This also seems like misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. First of all, it is absolutely laughable that something as essential as a thumbnail file picker is missing for that long, literally decades. Several patches have been submitted by people "willing to put muh effort and money in it" and got rejected because superficial idiotic reasons. On the other hand vast amount of resources are put into widely unpopular changes like client side window decoration, removing configuration options, turning everything into a tablet UI or breaking font rendering. And the "massive strides towards simplifying its codebase" means nothing more than dropping backwards compatibility on a regular basis while making everything more bloated and resource demanding.
Maybe Gnome is a project to sabotage the FOSS desktop. Stranger conspiracies turned out to be true. Personally I'd recommend: Don't use their software. Don't contribute to their ecosystem. Don't go to their conferences. Don't ever give them any money.