It’s the co-opting of GTK that drives that. GTK used to be fairly platform-neutral under Linux, and at least moderately neutral on other operating systems, adopting some of their conventions and with theme matching being possible. It has become increasingly aggressively GNOME-bound, so that with every major release it becomes more and more difficult to produce anything that looks or feels native on any platform other than GNOME. (Even under Linux; and it’s completely impossible to produce a good result for Windows any more.) Gutting theming. All but forcing a particular idiosyncratic form of overlay scrollbars. Insisting on client-side decorations and refusing almost to acknowledge the very existence of server-side decorations (in both GNOME Shell and GTK, from both ends). The list goes on, though these are probably the three biggest ones. From time to time they take a small step back (e.g. libadwaita) or present an apparent alternative (e.g. libdecor), but those options never work well, and I strongly suspect that, whether consciously or unconsciously, they’re just to try to placate the mobs. (libadwaita hasn’t gone anywhere near far enough, to the point where they might as well not have bothered: GTK is still riddled with mandatory GNOME HIG stuff that is strongly opposed to conventions on other platforms.)

’Tis said: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

But malice learns to wear incompetence as a mask, and organisations weaponsise incompetence.

I doubt that individual GNOME developers mean any malice. There may be no malice intended from any of the GNOME project leaders. But over the last few years I have steadily become convinced that cumulatively their actions and policies are active sabotage towards every last bit of the Linux desktop that isn’t GNOME.