I doubt stability was their intentions. They completely destroyed 3.38 compatibility, and all the poor bastards like me who decided to update their distro got a completely broken desktop. And I mean completely broken, too: my wallpaper was gone, every single extension broke, apps would no longer appear system-native when I defined a stylesheet and GNOME apps themselves looked inconsistent and glued-together.

I really recommend reading Tobias Bernard and other GNOME representative's blogs. Not because they're insightful, but because the self-righteousness that they use to talk about fairly personal and benign things completely clouds their view of the community. People complain about inconsistent apps: his solution is to destroy the theming ecosystem instead of fixing the shit that's wrong in Adwaita. People complain about broken extentions: his solution is to tell people that extentions are dumb, and you shouldn't be using them anyways. People complain about a toxic working environment: his response is to draft an even more exclusive CoC with vaguer rules and no precedent for enforcement. There are so many of these little anecdotes that it blows my mind they even have a desktop left at this point.

Like you say, it's free software so I can't complain too much. Nevertheless, it's wild to see how a perfectly functional desktop has lost the majority of it's beloved features with nothing more than a few philosophy adjustments.