I’m wildly confused at this claim. More like iPadOS, really??
iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have.
Let’s not forget that most Windows PCs on the market are available with touchscreens and a lot of people do use them. The Windows PC market is full of 2-in-1 convertibles that do not exist in Apple’s hardware lineup. Gnome isn’t losing their mind by making their desktop environment friendly to them. Apple is one of the only laptop manufacturers that has avoided touch panels on laptops entirely, because they want to sell you two devices with heavily overlapping functionality.
If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something else. You can even install Gnome and KDE at the same time and switch between if that's really your thing.
Gnome doesn't limit you to installing applications that are in Gnome's own design system. You say "The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu" but that's not really how it works on Linux. The desktop environment is just the desktop environment, it's essentially separate from everything else.
When we are talking about "Gnome apps" we are really only talking about ~30 core apps that are included with the OS. Many/most/all of them you could even uninstall entirely and replace with something else.
Gnome choosing to have a small settings pane is a deliberate choice to keep things simple for their desktop environment's intended audience, but it is not a deliberate choice to limit functionality or freedom (installing apps from third parties, changing your browser engine, compiling code on your own system, etc).
Very much unlike iPadOS.
And yes you can switch between multiple installed DEs and I have done so in the past, but that makes for a messy experience with many redundant apps that the user must clean up themselves. It’s a lot nicer to have just one installed.
I certainly don’t expect most users to switch between desktop environments but there are so many of them that complaining about one is a waste of breath.
This is a kind of "responsiveness" that should be implemented in GTK+ 4 and libadwaita (dynamically changing padding/size values within the theme depending on active input devices, with mouse supporting smaller sizes than touch-only input), not so much GNOME itself. Windows does it already, so it's a realistic possibility.