For me personally Gnome UI and UX is cleaner and simpler than MacOS. At the same time there are awesome community extensions that can fine tune Gnome behavior in ways MacOS users can only dream about.
I have used Gnome 2 before and while I was a bit skeptical at the launch of Gnome 3, I have embraced their approach and Gnome is currently my favorite DE by far.
I really wanted to like KDE because they implemented some technical features (fractional scaling, VRR, tearing support) years before Gnome, but it's too bloated and outdated for my liking. I rather live without some of those Wayland features that KDE support than loose the clean and less distracting looks and workflow of Gnome.
Gnome made a hard decision by going this direction and lost some users along the way, but I think that in the long term it has been worth it and has pushed Linux desktop further.