Just an anecdote: I'm currently patching nautilus to move ellipsisation of long filenames in the list view mode from center to right aligned, because of course there is no option for it, but technical books tend to have several authors, long names, and with Gnome's default center ellipsisation I can only see the author list and the year of a book.

Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of type ahead. The relatively recent type ahead efforts were blocked (or stalled) by "design considerations" https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/1... As the result Gnome Files is very unpleasant to use for deep trees with thousands of files in every directory on spinning media (zfs). The standard search feature also destroys context, i.e. being able to see the files filtered out by the query.

This release is also consecutively the third time they moved the list of ongoing file operations -- from top right, to top left, to bottom left. With all the obsession about "not confusing users" that the Gnome's leading figures declare the constant change in the UX should be one of the primary sources of the actual confusion users experience.