I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out.

GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruption -- between GNOME, Unity and all that mess, there was ~10 years where all the desktops that a new user was likely to encounter were just half baked solutions for a problem that most people couldn't entirely agree on.

I can agree with this to an extent. Projects that grow to a certain level of importance start to face new problems around community relations and governance, and it isn’t always a smooth transition. Generally speaking I think GNOME is doing better with this now.