GNOME continues the tradition of being the most consistent, beautiful desktop environment out there. A true feat of free software and collaboration.

Excellent release!

As someone who dualboots I love gnome out of the box, as has more or less the same windows shortcuts, being less taxing in muscle memory than MacOS or other DE.

Don't really fancy GNOME (due to workflow and trend of features removal) but have to agree with your statements.

As long as you do not try to customize it.

For me the limited customization is a feature. I am a very undecisive person and a lot of configuration options give me anxiety. I like the approach of having great defaults and the limited numer of options (with some customization possible via extensions) give me freedom to not have to worry about the desktop I'm using and just focus on the task at hand.

The extensions ecosystem [1] is great for customizing and I'm yet to find something I need to cusomize that doesn't have an extension for that.

https://extensions.gnome.org

Still going strong since 1999. Here's a nicer page with what's new: https://release.gnome.org/43/

It’s been 23 years… and still no thumbnail image in file picker.

It's been 23 years and I haven't needed these thumbnails, so... no issue for me.

I'm always disapointedly reminded of the lack of thumbnails when I need to pick the correct image when occasionally using Gnome. Imported photos are not yet automatically named by image content.