As someone who dualboots I love gnome out of the box, as has more or less the same windows shortcuts, being less taxing in muscle memory than MacOS or other DE.
Don't really fancy GNOME (due to workflow and trend of features removal) but have to agree with your statements.
As long as you do not try to customize it.
For me the limited customization is a feature. I am a very undecisive person and a lot of configuration options give me anxiety. I like the approach of having great defaults and the limited numer of options (with some customization possible via extensions) give me freedom to not have to worry about the desktop I'm using and just focus on the task at hand.
The extensions ecosystem [1] is great for customizing and I'm yet to find something I need to cusomize that doesn't have an extension for that.