There's much more to the story. GNOME is a sort of authoritarian organization known for their antisocial behavior: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... (and there's much, much more).

Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...

They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.

I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.

GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.