Their designers seem to have the cargo-cult logic of "if we remove enough features, we'll be as intuitive to use as MacOS!" (and whether MacOS even is intuitive is another question. I find its discoverability can be quite poor to those of us unused to it)

The only feature that GNOME misses imho that makes it unusable, are top bar icons. Apps are NOT going to drop them, many cross-platform applications people use on a day to day basis, can't be used properly without them.

It simply isn't viable to tell people for these apps to use alternatives, they don't exist when you're not in control of what your workplace uses. This makes an out the box gnome worse for working from home.

Yes, the API sucks for them and you have to poke some holes through sandboxes, but unless your Apple or Microsoft, you're in no position to get changes to these applications.

I don't really consider the lack of minimizing etc to make the OS unusable. GNOME is tasked and workspace based, and imho has the best workspaces of any mainstream desktop, it was built with workspaces in mind from day one, not tackled on after (e.g. Windows)

That was my thought. I like many DEs that are derived from Gnome, but in its default state Gnome is missing a lot of features, and yet still consumes a lot of RAM despite that.

I picture Gnome as a platform to be built on rather than a standalone DE

You are right about Gnome vs. macOS. It has many features which are not obvious and may be hidden behind an alt modifier key. But this makes it very usable for beginners and experts at the same time without alienating the other.

In the end Gnome seems to strive for a UI which scales from smartphones to big desktop screens with varying success. It's cool to know, that your desktop feed reader could work on your smartphone without changes in the future. But this Gnome future is always distant.