Is GNOME≥40 a bad thing for the Linux desktop?

I started using Linux during the GNOME 3 days, and GNOME looked and felt really cool and i wanted to use it, but my computer at the time was too potato to be able to use it and a couple of apps at the same time, so i just shrugged and alternated between Xfce, Cinnamon, and window managers, because i always found a couple of things wrong with each of them. Now i have a computer that i could comfortably use GNOME on, but i'm still not using it. I'm reluctantly using Plasma, because i think that's the most polished option outside of GNOME, but i'd still rather be using GNOME.

So why aren't i using it? Libadwaita. I feel like libadwaita basically asks you to subsist entirely off GNOME apps, lest you bear witness to the horrible clashing themes of any other toolkit. Since i don't really want to make myself do that, i don't wanna use GNOME. And i know there are kind of solutions to stuff like this, like adw-gtk3 and KvLibadwaita, but that just means i won't get to customize anything, and one of the things i enjoyed about Linux when i first got to use it was theming! (Theming isn't much better on KDE either, at least the way i see it. It doesn't feel like there are any real alternatives to Breeze.)

But the biggest problem isn't the experience in GNOME, but outside of it. It feels like something's been lost. When GNOME used GTK, it was like there was a whole ecosystem of themes that could be shared across all the desktop environments that used GTK. It felt like there was a Linux platform that you could target, and have your application look good on every GTK desktop, and good enough on KDE. You could be using any desktop and feel like you got access to everything.

Now that the biggest desktop out there has dropped it, it feels like that ecosystem has all but died out. Feels like there are more apps being made than ever, but they're only being made for GNOME. Open Flathub right now, and you'll see lots of genuinely useful little apps that use libadwaita. You can use them on another desktop, but you know they'll look out of place. I wanted to develop an app, and libadwaita feels like the most attractive option, and i'd probably use it if it weren't for this problem. Maybe that's why all these apps exist, but it's a shame, right?

And since Valve's hardware that's going to be bringing in lots of new users is packing KDE, many of the people discovering Linux through that will find these apps and think "this kinda sucks", because it does. We're in a state where Steam or an Electron app feels more native to Linux than a GNOME app does.

I liked GNOME because it didn't look like Windows, and it didn't look like Mac. It made Linux feel like its own thing. That's been the case ever since GNOME 2, and continues to be the case now, so it sucks that GNOME≥40 has this problem.

Sometimes i download a live ISO of a GNOME distribution and just yearn for theming to be brought back to GNOME and make Linux whole again, but what sucks the most about this is that unlike the bugs or missing features that exist in the Linux desktop, nobody at GNOME wants this fixed.