I also saw some complaints of this form. If I recall correctly they were non-contributors complaining that Gnome devs were dedicating too much time to refactoring and deprecating APIs and not spending enough time implementing features that they wanted.
I'll give you that Gnome developer communication often comes off as defensive, but as an outsider I'm also shocked at the volume and tone of complaints they get -- I doubt I would be able to put up with such toxic users for very long.
Ever since that experience I’ve become highly sympathetic to open source devs of all stripes. The only partial exception are blatantly corporate projects making blatantly corporate decisions (eg React/Angular or VS Code telemetry)
But as part of searching for some contribution to make I went through a whole list of bug and feature requests.
And while it’s almost impossible to prove that the people are the same, what was very evident was the sense of entitlement displayed by both groups.
Frankly, even as someone who isn’t part of the Gnome community and was simply looking to maybe fix some language translations, the toxicity from the people who didn’t contribute anything was overwhelming. It’s fair enough to complain about something not being up to par. But that very quickly transforms into claims that the developers have an evil agenda.
The file picker bug situation and the bug report handling was just horrible (the quotes in the thread above show that quite well), the project has only itself to blame for the negative attitude it got from that. Let there be praise that this situation might improve now (will take ages until GTK4 is everywhere, probably never), not use this situation to bash the users that took the time and effort to give their feedback.
Users like me who got annoyed by never being able to easily select the wanted image (when in a gtk app), for many many years now, had no insight into any architectural changes or code cleanups of gtk4. So there weren't any complains from this group there.
This is the typical "everyone is against us" you often hear from the gnome side. It's a shame to read this under such a nice release, which has only positive changes as far as I can see, it really seems to address a lot of the criticism in a good way.