I had the chance to speak with a GNOME developer about this. Apparently GNOME is trying to be the little old lady desktop that's intuitive for grandma. Which is fine - if it's marketed as that, and not put on the same level as KDE or even tiling WMs, and not trying to influence the entire ecosystem.
I put it down to the level of monopolization of industry and to a certain extent our culture. These people mean well and they're mostly just reacting to a really baffling labor market in the face of a failed and entirely captured internet revolution.
With the right pair of eyes you can look across the dunes of github into the early 2000s and see where open source culture peaked, crashed, and rolled back.