Is GNOME as a community project? My reading of https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... is that it is driven largely by Red Hat and to some degree other companies.

To your general point (why attack the project): GNOME has a reputation (IMO deserved) for aggressively not caring about the opinions of users or outside projects (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795901). So at some point it comes to "GNOME hates everyone else, so everyone else hates GNOME".