It's minimalist in the sense that they have decided what you should be allowed to have as a user, and any extensions you rely on to bring back functionality that has been considered basic for 30 years will break with every version.

other environments can start as minimalist, but once you have set them up in the way you want, those features will rarely go away. usually that would be considered a bug/regression, not a feature.

In my experience unless you upgrade on the exact date of the new Gnome release most of those extensions get updated within a month or 2 of the release.

Additionally if non breakage and stability is a must for you the long term support distros such as debian, ubuntu LTS or an rhel derivative such as Almalinux are available.

While obtaining and using newer software was annoying on long term support distros in the past, tools such as flatpak, toolbox and distrobox have made it super easy now so you can run a super stable system+desktop basis that doesn't change in 10 years alongside bleeding edge apps.