But why does the world always go along with it? In an alternate universe, the community just said "yeah, no thanks, I'll keep using Gnome 2", which they continued maintaining under the name Elf or whatever.
There are only so many people willing (and able) to do the often difficult and unglamorous programming work that goes into maintaining something like Gnome.
If you're working on a major distro you have a certain level of trust in Gnome 3 because the same people delivered and supported Gnome 2. I'm sure when Gnome 3's direction became clear dozens or hundreds said "no way! I'm going to start my own fork which will never change!"
But how do you know which one to pick?
This means all DBus interfaces need to use the new name, a nautilus plugin must now call caja functions instead and so on.
Chicken and egg problem: Popular distros will follow popular DE's, because they have the most people making their way out of bugs and problems.
MATE, on the other hand, is kinda barren compared to more popular options. Even if it's the same old Gnome2 desktop of yore
Oh, so it did happen, I’m not currently a Linux user and had no idea!