This is purely my impression and not something I could prove, but it feels like Gnome wanted to have an out-of-the-box Mac-like experience, while not really understanding while people like using Macs. "You don't have a million configuration options on a Mac, so neither should we!" doesn't account for Apple having whole departments working on UI things, choosing sane defaults, etc. People don't like macOS because it doesn't give them options, but because it tried to make good decisions and patterns so that they won't need to tweak everything.

I know lots of people don't like Macs because they're not super tweakable, and that's fine. It's still my impression that Gnome is aiming for that target, while not quite understanding why a lot of people do like Macs.