Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will until you upgrade your Ubuntu version and you open it up to find a message that "your file manager is deprecated. use this crappy fork with fewer features instead", only to have it abandoned after a few years because the devs for the fork got butthurt. I'm so glad I ditched Linux. Got tired of losing features because of people's egos, and being told ffmpeg was deprecated when it really wasn't became the final…
Is that relevant to Gnome? It's used the same file manager "Nautilus" for years. Apple and Microsoft are also quite capable of killing software projects.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/gnom...
Gnome may be different now, but they were part of a pattern in the GNU/Linux community that ultimately caused me to leave it. I knew I couldn't rely on either Gnome or distros themselves because they seemed to have no problem changing things out from underneath you, and more often than not it seemed like those things were done as a form of self promotion.
This wasn't a one off thing. This was the Linux world for a good number of years, in my experience. Anyone who used Ubuntu or Debian from 2008 to around 2013 might remember the forks that happened because DEs up and decided that they knew better than their own users.
Not specifically about Gnome, but I brought up FFmpeg (or rather libav) as another example of the bullshit of Linux. Some devs decided that they didn't like the architecture of FFmpeg and wanted it to be organized to their liking, so they forked it into Libav/avconv, which was inferior to FFmpeg but the people who run the Debian repositories were convinced that Libav was the future so they replaced FFmpeg with an alias to avconv that had a totally misleading deprecation message that was basically a lie.
So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gnome one day decided to get rid of thumbnails and not provide an option to turn them back on. Yes, I am bitter from the latter years of my Linux usage. Somehow macOS can update and upgrade its versions without causing me to question whether aspects of the UI I rely upon will spontaneously disappear or gaslight me into thinking I shouldn't be using those things anymore.