GNOME wasn't like this, I favoured GNOME during the whole Gtk+ vs Qt licensing wars, and even wrote an article to The C/C++ Users Journal as kind of advocacy for Gtkmm.

Eventually with their desired to push JavaScript all over the place, instead of improving Vala, the whole desktop redesign, and the issues that features standard in GNOME 1.0 are nowadays the extension mess you mention, made me don't care any longer.

For a while I moved into Unity, then XFCE, and then nothing, as my Linux usage now is constrained to headless (server/containers), or the consumer distributions of WebOS and Android.

However if I ever going back to having a Linux desktop, it will surely be a decision between everything else except GNOME.