Unity has often been criticized because it was a Canonical thing and didn't leverage Wayland, but it's another world compared to Gnome shell. I couldn't like gnome shell no matter what.
I was using Gnome shell on a old eeepc. The interface is dumbed down and you have to install a bunch of extensions to make it as functional as Unity.
What was worse is that the launcher automatically triggered the search function, and that slowed down the pc to a crawl. I'm using KDE on it now and, even though less stable, it has a decent interface and it is surprisingly snappy.