I use GNOME and honestly like it despite the many flaws. May be some sort of Stockholm syndrome, IDK. As I see I spent most of my time on the CLI or on the browser so the DE in itself doesn't matter that much and GNOME advantage is that I don't have to waste time troubleshooting and customizing it (not even possible sometimes) so I can focus on the things that matter. If you compare DEs pages on Arch Wiki, GNOME by far has the smaller 'Troubleshooting' section. Also when you use something for a long time you know how to workaround it's limitations and fix things while.

How come does every distro default to it, make it incredibly hard to opt-out, and then decide it's the best one available because it has more than double the installed base of the next option?

I simply do not understand people.

I use GNOME only because my favorite OS right now is Pop OS and it's what they ship by default. Otherwise, I'd still probably be laboring to get KDE, XFCE, or MATE to be a satisfactory experience.

The only thing that makes GNOME bearable for me are a handful of extensions and post-install tweaks. Specifically Dash-to-Panel and ArcMenu.

The biggest thing that still annoys me is the GNOME folks have this fetish about stuffing as many widgets as they can into the titlebars of windows.

It's like using MacOS- there is a set of limited utility it provides, and anything else must be achieved externally, ie- with another DE, WM, or in terminal.

For very basic desktop usage, GNOME 3 does about 65% of what I need. Because it's Linux, I can have TTYs that run KDE, i3, or more customized shells that accomplish the rest.

Not doing this would be an exercise in learned helplessness, which is exactly what I chose Linux to get away from.

I use GNOME technically, but in earnest I use whatever Pop!_OS decides to go with. It’s been fine transitioning off LXDE and macOS for me. That said, I don’t feel like a Linux power user or anything.