Gnome is not a distro. It doesn't provide a user facing distro.
It's a DE that other people are building the largest distros on.
They should be adding stuff based on their priorities, while Gnome's priority should be advancing the DE while ensuring their DE does not break all the many major distros that are based off Gnome.
It's a good thing that the distros can then add/fix stuff based on their priorities. That's what open development is about. That's what allows Canonical to differentiate from a Fedora. How they choose to prioritize the features/fixes they build on top of Gnome.
Maybe they're doing something right?
If your definition of major distros is limited to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, then probably. Linux Mint was born out of rejecting GNOME, Arch is not opinionated, Manjaro defaults to KDE (although "defaults" here may be a wrong word), SteamOS defaults to KDE, openSUSE defaults to KDE, then there's PopOS...
The magic of the open source gives you the possibility to see it. And I do sometimes take a look into a shitshow of management which is this three years old triple buffering MR [1]. Don't get me wrong, I didn't examine the code thoroughly, it might be a marvel of engineering, but when it takes you more than three years (and counting!) to land a feature, to the point where some people start to forgot why it was even necessary in the first place [2], and when downstream has to monkey-patch your feature as-is because the benefits are so big [3], you cannot say your development processes are alright.
And it's not only triple buffering, you can see the same pattern in the MR for VRR [4].
1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
2. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441#...
3. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/why-ubuntu-22-04-is-so-fast-a...
4. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154