The contempt for user experience displayed at Gnome, over such a long period, is breathtaking,
in its way, but Gnome are certainly far from alone. Apple presents the same experience, to me, except involving different details. Windows, too. KDE, too. Maybe one or other get icon-view in file pickers right, but there is a lot else to be got right, and they don't. More importantly, they neither want to get it right, nor want to enable you to get it right.
The commonality is not the details, which differ, but the attitude. "This is our thing, not your thing, so we will do what we like, not what you like." This is most evident in cases when a shiny new release, with hundreds of new singing, dancing penguins, breaks a thing that used to work.
"The old release was better." "But look, dancing penguins!" "Dancing penguins do nothing for me." "But look, dancing penguins!" "I want a way to switch back." "NO. Dancing Penguins!"
Apple's great achievement is getting their customers to believe that they always and only ever cared about the dancing penguins, and to forget instantly about each thing that had once worked, once it is gone. Gnome aspires to that, but lacks Apple's reality distortion field, so must make do with contempt.