Gnome is a deliberate choice for me.

First of all, for me the DE and its "features" aren't even that important.

I spend easily 90% of my time on the computer either in an IDE or a terminal or a browser. I don't click around on my desktop a lot, so in a way I'm not using my DE very excessively.

The only thing I want from my DE is that it gets out of my way, is somewhat minimalist, and allows me to bring up those applications and change between them in an effective way.

I was using the i3 window manger for a long time (and still have it installed) but at some point noticed that I simply don't "need" it. I don't do a lot of fancy arrangements in my usual workflow and within the terminal I have tmux either way. Gnome makes assigning shortcuts to applications just as simple as i3, it arranges windows left and right with win+arrow and maximizes them and offers an great alt-tab window switcher (can me modified with extensions). Pressing Super-Key gives you an overview over all windows and workspaces as well as the possibility to open any app or settings or files by typing its name.

And this is basically all the management I need and Gnome does it fast, stable and simple. You may say that's not a reason to switch to Gnome once you're used to a wm and that's true but if it doesn't make any difference at all for me, I just though having a 'real' DE can be nice from time to time. Sometimes I want to have an applications menu ordered by categories, sometimes it's nice to add functionality to the top bar with one click instead of figuring out what to put into the i3bar config file and to disable it with a click (instead of searching +commenting it out again). In some cases it's more intuitive to drag the windows around to other workspaces with the mouse while looking at an overview of all windows and workspaces, instead of hammering in key combinations to focus and then move a certain window to workspace X.

Still, compared to other more traditional desktops like KDE or XFCE I felt like Gnome came closer to the simple and effective workflow of a window manager.

Of course it's a problem that you sometimes have to wait for a couple of extensions until they are updated for a new, already released version of Gnome but overall I like the extensions system. You start with a very basic, minimal DE and add what you want. And there are a lot of great Gnome extensions out there imo.

Last and also least but still nice: I think that Gnome shell with a good icon+gtk theme is probably the best/most modern looking DE out there.