I would say the opposite. If GNOME was a clone of OS X Panther it would be fine. Instead they've introduced a bunch of UI "innovations" that most people don't like.
If Gnome keeps rewriting apps and making mistakes, that's very much Gnome's fault.
In fact, it was Gnome that dragged Debian into the systemd debacle. Lennart Poettering managed to convince the Gnome developers to introduce a hard dependency [1] on systemd.