I'm going to posit that unless you've used GNOME, KDE, etc. on more than one distribution, it's potentially unfair to judge the DE based on that singular experience.

I've had very different experiences with various desktops depending on which distribution they are on. Ubuntu tends to customize GNOME more than Fedora, so it's possible that what you didn't like was more to do with Ubuntu than GNOME. (Not dissing Ubuntu here - I tested 24.04 recently and it was fine. I actually liked some of their customizations.)

Frankly, does it matter?

I was forced into ubuntu in that job, so whatever Canonical was shipping was effectively GNOME to me.

Also i looked into dealing with that "flavour" of gnome and the settings availability was just poor. Even XFCE which is a way smaller project does have more and better settings.

And let's not even pull KDE into the discussion, KDE has literally TONS of options.

Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu desktop, not Gnome desktop.

It uses Gnome but it isn't Gnome.

It's 99% GNOME with few additions that can be disabled if you want a more pure experience

By that definition virtually nobody uses Windows. Shipping gnome with extensions doesn't make it not Gnome. It is in fact the only Gnome that the majority of users have used given the relative popularity of Ubuntu vs Fedora.