As a long-time Gnome user, my frustration is less with the overall design philosophy, which is fine. It's with the tendency to remove features and the devs unwillingness to acknowledge usage patterns that deviate from it. Don't like the change we're making? That's because you're using it wrong!

One of my favorite examples is the removal of the "type-ahead" search in Nautilus, Gnome's file browser. You used to be able to quickly jump to files and folders by typing their names. The devs at some point decided to remove this feature and replace it with a recurrent search that requires a CPU heavy background process for indexing and would search the entire file tree for files whose name (or contents) matched what you type. It was orders of magnitudes slower than type-ahead and basically made it impossible to efficiently navigate with the keyboard. The feedback was overwhelmingly negative, but the feature never came back. I eventually switched to a different file browser (first Thunar, then Nemo).

Having a philosophy is all good and well. The point where it turns into dogma is when you stop listening to user feedback and start declaring everyone wrong who disagrees with it.