It is not a "user-hostile attitude" to remove features. Every project that does some kind of user study will do this eventually, because:

1. Not every feature is equally useful

2. No one is using the feature, and so maintaining it is a waste of time

3. Sometimes developers discover a better way to implement a feature

4. Some features can turn out to be just harmful and misleading

5. There is no one available who wants to maintain the feature and so it slowly deteriorates and breaks over time, and must be removed to prevent further breakage

And so on. If you program in your day job, I bet you can think of a few other valid reasons you have removed a feature at work, too. GNOME has not done anything out of the ordinary here, and it is incorrect to describe it this way. If you believe they have taken specific actions that were hostile towards you, then you should say what those actions are. But the mere act of changing or removing a feature that you happened to use is not a display of hostility, it is just the normal development process working as intended.

>and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+

This is incorrect, Gnome 3+ can be configured with shell extensions.