MacOS has some really clunky stuff. I hate finder. I like Gnome once I add dash to dock, tray icons, and window manager tweaks. I’m just saying the defaults are a bad choice if they want adoption.

Totally agree. Dash To Dock + App Indicators seem like they should be part of Gnome. I end ups changing to the icons to Papirus as I prefer those. They make Gnome really nice to use.

I use GNOME without extensions. The default are fine by me.

But your use case is why GNOME have extensions. To alter the defaults and add stuff that they don't care about, but you do. In macOS, you have to basically reverse engineer and use private APIs.