Yes, the hate coincided with "lets make Gnome look like OSX instead of Windows".
I'm forced to use Wayland on my laptop, which sadly means I forced to use Gnome 3. To those saying "try it": I do, it's just not for me. It's choices are just plain weird.
To explain, what a good UI looks like largely depends on display size. On a tiny display like a phone there is no space for window decorations or a menu bar going across the entire screen, let alone a 2nd application window. Which is why iOS and Android have no window decorations at all, and often no dedicated menu button either.
Increase the screen real estate a bit, and a dedicated menu bar that makes all functions faster to reach becomes an affordable luxury along with a task switcher to reduce flipping between applications a single click. Hell, you might even allow the user to display multiple windows. That's what the Apple desktop has, and it made sense back in the day when they were first released.
Scale it up further, and running multiple windows on the same display starts making sense. If you do flipping between application now needs zero clicks. And now you can see the app and it's help screen at same time, and you can happily drag and paste from one window to another. With so much space you can easily afford to give each app it's own menu bar, borders that permit scaling and moving of windows, and more besides.
Gnome3 was introduced as a desktop window manager when we were very firmly in the era of HD displays. And for reasons I suspect I'll never don't understand, they chose the same layout the first Mac's used 30 years previously and even more infuriatingly pressed you at every change it got into maximising your window to occupy the entire display - almost as if it was dealing with a phone sized screen.
As soon as mint / cinnamon / lxqt moves to Wayland, I'm gone.