They started making UX changes without justification in like 2016. That was when I quit using GNOME and switched to DWM. GNOME 3 used to be decent. I prefered it to G2/Mate for a few years at the start.
Truth be told, I didn't
hate GNOME Shell on launch. Let's be blunt here: GNOME 3 and KDE 4 were basically the worst of both worlds for all of 2011. KDE Software Compilation 4 shot for the moon and burst into flames without ever leaving orbit like the Challenger, Cinnamon didn't exist yet (only the original Mint Gnome Shell Extensions), MATE was still just some no-name project on the AUR that Linux Mint hadn't yet fully adopted, and this was long before 12.04 dropped and gave us a polished Unity interface. You were basically stuck with novel computing paradigms no matter what you tried to use at the time. Yes, Xfce counted as "novel" because it was a non-GNOME 2.x GTK interface that was both independent of GNOME and also hideously dependent because normal Xfce apps were fucking awful.
GNOME Shell was clunky, new updates broke everything you had that got it usable, but it felt... fresh? Kinda tolerable compared to the utter
mess that Unity was on Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, it wasn't hideous like Xubuntu or Lubuntu, it kinda grew on ya after you used GNOME Tweak Tool and set up some extensions like Dash2Panel, hell even the GNOME Fallback session was genuinely pleasing to use. Of course, none of this matters because Unity on Ubuntu 12.04 was finally damn good stuff to use, Cinnamon and MATE finally became widespread, and rather than adopting the best of all worlds, the GNOME team decided to keep shooting themselves in the foot and making it the broader ecosystem's problem.
That golden period where GNOME 3 actually ran on FreeBSD without issue? Gone the moment that hard systemd dependency became a thing.
Trying to uphold the standards set by Freedesktop despite all the problems the standards body's had? Fuck off, make way for GNOME Human Interface Design.
Giving users the option for GNOME Fallback or Xorg sessions? Piss off, use case was always provisional. Wayland GNOME Shell or bust.
Allowing other GTK-based applications to be cross-platform? Nope. GNOME applications are GNOME applications first and foremost.
Seriously, we had a renaissance period where Plasma 5 was genuinely the best fucking thing to use, leaps and bounds ahead of GNOME Shell, prettier than default Cinnamon, all that stuff... and then Plasma 6 and its consequences happen where Wayland-first sessions broke everything, Xorg session is noticeably worse in quality, bug reports keep stacking up with no action dates, there's now actual corporate investment from Red Hat by making Fedora KDE equivalent to Fedora Workstation, but all we get are regressions after regressions without any fucking hope of resolution despite aggressive feature updates.
Moral of the story? We must protect Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and LXQt (almost forgot about that one) from the enshittification menace at all costs.