Two of GNOME's recent updates have made searching menus for a rarely used item incredibly painful:

1. Replace the menubar with a hamburger menu; in some cases the hamburger menu then contains file/edit/&c. so it's just a spurious extra click

2. Require a click to see the contents of a submenu and a click to go back

Fortunately my most-used GNOME application (Evolution) has an option to restore the old behavior for both of those, but I literally cannot think of the motivation for these two changes that clearly make things worse. The only halfway plausible idea I have heard for #2 is that the GNOME UX designers think that submenus are bad, so if you make them hard enough to use, developers will stop putting them in their applications. #1 is probably partly a looks thing, and partly a "too many people have fewer horizontal lines on their screens than I did in 2004[1]" thing.

1: That's when I got a 1600x1200 monitor; people today with 1080p screens have only 56 more lines than the 1280x1024 monitor I had been using since the previous millennium

The GNOME project seems like it has a strong desire to converge all on-screen UI onto mobile-like patterns. There are some mobile conventions that can be brought over to desktop without impairing usage too much but I think that perhaps it’s starting to cross too far over to the mobile side of the line.

It’s unfortunate because in other ways I find GNOME/GTK more agreeable than KDE/Qt (layout of controls within windows is consistently better in GTK environments/apps for example, Qt apps have a tendency to feel slapdash/haphazard/“engineery”) but I don’t like the increasingly strong mobile influence.