Pretty art, but this meme is really getting boring. I think people are just regurgitating "GNOME bad" because they heard it from some tech youtuber instead of actually trying GNOME for themselves. IMHO GNOME is awesome. It's a bit different, but very comfortable when you get used to it. And definitely reliable.

I often see people using some h4x0r i3wm setup scrolling through workspaces and windows for literal minutes trying to find some app they were using earlier, while on GNOME you can just see everything spatially organised in the activities view. They think they have it "tailored for their needs", but they end up with an unmanageable config file with bits copy-pasted from the internet that is getting harder to understand over time and keeps breaking. I know it from my own experience too, I got tired of it and came back to GNOME.

But if you wanna go down that route, GNOME is also highly customisable. There's lots of extensions that let you change every aspect of it. If you know some JavaScript, you can make your own, there's a decent community and documentation. Things like Niri or Cosmic actually started off as GNOME extensions.