All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go, considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime with the infamous gnome-screensaver.
Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a link to. 2. https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.