Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you
Rebuttal: I’m extremely fickle, so someone else making choices for me is what I need. In KDE I ~~spent~~ wasted days customizing and just gave up in the end. It’s the same idea as using prettier instead of using your own lint rules: you stop wasting time and just do the thing you’re there to do.
In general, for configs (linting, neovim, etc), I prefer taking something really good and tweaking the parts I dislike—which is the model GNOME uses. Probabilistically, it’s exponentially likely that your preferences are only a little bit away from someone else—just use their thing and spend 15 minutes tweaking them.
Cinnamon absolutely is fantastic, and I 100% agree that it gets out of the way really well.
I'm curious what you needed to do that GNOME was fighting you. I'm not invalidating it, I'm genuinely just curious, since I haven't used a Linux system for personal/work use for about 5 years now, so my ideas of GNOME/KDE/etc. are almost certainly dated. To clarify: vanilla GNOME is kind of awful, and I've always wondered if anyone genuinely uses it stock while also being aware that extensions exist.