Does Red Hat monitor the mouse travel distance to measure "employee productivity," or how did they end up with this design?
No, as far as I can tell the rationale is just "more familiar to MacOS and Windows users".
Of course, the rationale changes every couple of years, because it's not like Gnome 3 was trying to be a "familiar" design.
Oh well, I've been using extensions to override Gnome's silly decisions forever anyway. As long as they don't take that away...
The travel distance they introduced is just too annoying.
Why are you even using the mouse in the activities overlay
Anyway, it's often legitimately faster to use the mouse with the Dash to Dock extension. It blows my mind that it's not the default behavior of the dock.
This requires you pin your "favorite" apps in the dock, but once you put them there they're always available with those key combos (whether they're running yet or not). Once you internalize the order, you don't even need to open the activities view at all (except for your more seldom used programs).