Meanwhile, every time Gnome makes UI adjustments along these lines, there's an outcry that it's dumbed downed, copying apple, removing features etc etc.
Well Gnome tells people that they should just know keyboard shortcuts for everything - which is literally something only power users know to do. Their entire design ethos is a weird opposition to itself where it is aiming to be so simple and minimal that in order to do basic things you have to memorize keyboard shortcuts as there is no visual interface possibility to do those things.