Gnome Shell in particular offers a ridiculously coherent, sane window management. Nobody agrees with all the choices the Gnome Team took to get here, but it sure is nice there being one way of doing everything that makes sense contextually.
It's like trying to make a car without any round edges because "square edges are better". Good luck with the wheels!
I can fix that somewhat with extensions, but every normal person I know will take one look at the defaults and abandon it. That's a reasonable choice in my opinion. Why use something where the first interaction gives you a clear indication you're going to be fighting against developer ideology?
If you want to customize your DE a lot - Gnome isn't for you.
If you just want a clean and productive environment by default... Gnome is great.
Once you stop fighting it, sigh, and go with the flow... modern Gnome is genuinely pleasant in that I spend almost zero time thinking about it, and shit just works.
I still run other DEs for some specific purposes where "general use" isn't the goal, but I can reliably hand non-technical family members a machine with Gnome and they don't have to come ask me a bunch of questions.
KDE on the other hand just has these and is also great out-of-the-box (I pretty much run stock KDE).