GNOME suddenly changing things for the worse, breaking muscle memory and making previously easy things difficult or impossible, while tone-deaf developers intone the "it's not broken, your workflow's broken" mantra in the background, has become a regular thing. It's like living in hurricane country and accepting you'll need to replace the windows from time to time.
I really wish they'd stop doing this, though.
Have you tried either GNOME Classic or MATE? It seems like a difficult ask to request that developers stop trying new things.
To me, the most famous bug is that an entry is selected by default when you enter a directory. This renders it nearly impossible to select a directory (instead of a file) from the picker, because you will always enter the directory instead of picking it! The only way is to first enter the target directory, deselect the default with control-click, and then hit okay.
> The developers still claim it’s working as intended.
If they are the developers they probably know what they intended.