GNOME has the unenviable position where everybody wants to use it —cite: we are— but we all still love to bitch about it. If it were so bad, we'd have jumped ship, or stayed with Mate or Cinnamon or whatever the 2.x branch was called.
I guess from our point of view, we feel a little like hostages and just because we don't like these changes, doesn't mean we want to migrate to another desktop; still, I cannot ignore that I'm paying nothing for the maintenance and development of this system and I'm not investing my time in its development or governance, so frankly who am I to say what should be what?
But it wasn’t GNOME’s project—they took over maintenance of something that was used by many, and for many years maintained this trust, acting benevolently. But more recently (mostly from GTK+ 3 on) they have acted increasingly hostilely, thoroughly violating the trust placed in them by the community. And the way things have happened makes it very difficult to successfully fork it, quite similarly to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish theory (though in a somewhat different space). It’s made particularly hard by the fact that GTK+ 3 and GTK 4 each make deeply-interwoven good and bad changes, so forking from an earlier version would be a significant regression as well as a significant fix. Combine the general mutual incompatibilities and how deeply GTK is woven into apps, and forking becomes quite impractical.
I personally _have_ stuck with cinnamon (and toyed with mate, too, but imho GTK3 itself has enough nice things to justify using it.)
So far cinnamon has mostly been able to roll back the worst of the changes, and I haven't had many complaints. But the push to do things like encourage every piece of software to draw its UI into the window decorations isn't something cinnamon can fix... they'd have to fork the world.
It's not surprising they're in no rush to throw that out.