Gnome is great for people who like the opinionated workflow. Sadly that is not most people, at least I know of 5 people who tried Gnome and 4 came to the conclusion that the lack of a taskbar/launcher/dock makes it unsuitable for their desktop usage.
If Gnome had an optional dock, they might’ve actually used it and found out how great Gnome is. Maybe at some point they’d even disable the dock and return to the blessed workflow.