The introduction of hamburger menus broken many of the Alt+Letter shortcut workflows. Even to this day, GNOME applications are hard to fully control via keyboard.

I'll never understand how this can be deemed acceptable from an accessibility standpoint.

For all of GNOME's faults, it's provided me a much better experience than other DE's. XFCE and others don't handle fractional scaling nearly as gracefully as GNOME does. KDE is probably the closest but you still have the issue of running GTK/QT apps and they all look very different and jarring on the desktop.

that's pretty easy

unfortunately much harder to avoid all GTK3+ apps

especially the cursed open/save dialogs, which are so bad I'd prefer the Windows 3.1 dialog

Seconded. They are designing for a theoretical user that does not exist.

I should really thank them though.

I disliked the black bars release(v3 I think) so much that I moved back to KDE and then also tried lxqt, xfce and i3 but never GNOME. If not for that release I would have probably been stuck with only GNOME and never try other options.