[0] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [1] https://garudalinux.org/editions (screenshots don't do it justice)
Once they finish sucking donations and other forms of financial support they'll probably announce it's time to "sunset" Gnome/gtk because it sadly didn't met unspecified expectations of unspecified group of people.
Gnome team, what they did and what they still want to do, their attitude towards users - especially those who dare to criticize them is THE result of polluting FOSS with corporate style of software development.
Theming and customization of Linux is half-dead because of what happens at Gnome.
To make my biases clear: I'm a software developer that uses Gnome daily, and is developing a GTK/Adwaita app. I used to rice a lot back in the i3 days, but I don't particularly care about that nowadays, and stick to the defaults when I can. For my purposes, GNOME and Adwaita is perfect since it's very opinionated by default, and you can make good looking apps with minimal effort. Since all Adwaita apps are supposed to look similar and follow the same HIG, most of my desktop apps have the same look - but more importantly, the developers of the apps can also be confident that their apps look correct on my desktop. This is something that developers in the GTK space generally want, and for good reason[0].
One argument is that you as a user of the desktop should be able to have the final say on how your apps look, which is a totally valid take! And there are DEs, WMs, and apps which give you this freedom like Hyprland. But this doesn't guarantee that those apps will look good, or look consistent with each other, or even act consistently across apps. On the other hand, I as an app developer want to guarantee that my app looks good on your desktop, and the easiest way to achieve that is to target a single desktop environment, rather than an infinite combination of possibly-similar-but-maybe-completely-different desktops. Every preference has a cost[1][2], and when you take this philosophy beyond just preferences and expand it to color schemes, padding, margin, iconography, typography, it becomes unmanageable.
This isn't to say that GNOME is perfect, and I disagree with the project on some fundamental technical things like not supporting xdg-layer-shell[3], and refusing to accommodate server-side decorations for apps which don't want to render decorations themselves. (On the cultural side I can't comment, since I have no experience with that.) But in my opinion, this is the project that can deliver a usable and consistent Linux desktop to the average person the most effectively.
[0]: https://stopthemingmy.app/
[1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2021/07/13/community-power-...
[2]: https://ometer.com/preferences.html
[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/1141
I suspect the thing that rubs a lot of people the wrong way with Gnome isn't so much the lack of customization or theming, but actual decisions behind how the user interface should work. People simply complain about the inability to customize Gnome as a reflection of how powerless they are to do anything about those decisions.
But also that the Gnome philosophy "leaks" into the wider ecosystem, thanks to the dominance of Gtk.
(I use GtkWave as a waveform viewer. I have it installed systemwide, and it has proper menus. If I activate the oss-cad-suite environment [which is superb - this isn't a dig at that project] I have to remember to specify its full path when running it, otherwise I get a newer build shipped with oss-cad-suite, which has hamburger menus.)