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I can understand that GNOME wanted to migrate off of C for the non-core things, so they cut down features. Now if you need something you can write a plugin in JS.

It has advantages, and of course disadvantages too. (The expressiveness of the plugin API is naturally lacking compared to possibilities of built-in features, but with time that can/will change.)

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Right now the main disadvantage is that GNOME Shell is single-threaded, and handles not only those JS extensions, but also essential tasks like window compositing. This means that a misbehaving extension can freeze the whole desktop, which is especially bad on Wayland where that includes the mouse cursor and input processing.

I still prefer GNOME for the rest of its UX, but if you ask me, the next rewrite can't happen too soon.

Edit: I noticed that some of the new improvements seem to be addressing just this, so what I'm saying may be out of date in regards to the latest version.

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