Genuine question:

By "tinkering" do you mean every once in a while something really important completely stops working and you have to pull your hair out in the middle of some important work in order to get that thing fixed so you can use your computer properly again, which usually involves a series of incomprehensible steps you found on the 17th page of a phpBB forum thread?

Or...?

Because, that being one primary reason many people choose macOS over Windows, it would really suck.

Asking because the article was interesting, Gnome looked great, and it'd be genuinely fantastic if this assumption on my part was wrong.

Unless you are on a rolling release distribution things don't just stop working out of the blue.

But if you want to have some new thing or change something so it works more how you would like, that can lead to some tinkering.

Agree - a rolling-release-distribution (e.g. Gentoo, which is the one I'm using) can update anytime any software/program to any major higher version (which might have "breaking" changes) anytime => I never do any update when I know that I'll absolutely need the system anytime soon (e.g. not now that I'm changing flat as I need Libreoffice&Cups to write&print docs).

To me it means I think of a workflow which would make things smoother for me, I make it so I can do that. But it takes tinkering.

I see something nice someone is using or has done. Then I can copy their config, but that's their personal config and I want something slightly different. That takes tinkering.

OSX is basically: Use it as designed. And it's designed for what most people want, but if you want to push the boundaries of that you are going to have a frustrating experience.