There is a heck of a lot of opinion in this article. GNOME itself and the direction they've taken has been a source of endless debate.
I remember the time they took out the transparency options in GNOME Terminal for the same reasons used in this article. One person's "bloat" is another persons much loved feature.
Gnome is mostly removing features to make maintenance easier for them.
They'd rather push the narrative that there is one right way to do things and settings are unnecessary.
Needless to say, this has bit them in the bum many times and will continue to do so as time goes on. Remember how adamant they were about a sidedock with no option to change it?
I mean the ideal solution here is include all of those features by default and then allow users to turn them off/remove them as they please
Personally I think pretty much everything included in gnome is pretty essential to a standard desktop experience, if you start chopping bits off and don't have anything to replace them with you end up with a nonfunctional system as far as the average user is concerned
dconf can also be configured with text files (with a format similar to ‘.ini’ files), although enabling this support isn’t trivial, and it’s not the most well documented feature.
I also used to run a ”lobotomized” Gnome, but TBH I found it easier in the long run to start from a minimal base.
I want good text rendering and windows and buttons with rounded corners. I want my laptop to work correctly when connecting it to external displays or projectors without a lot of futzing around. I want vsync to work with my monitor out of the box, I want to be able to watch video without tearing, and I want a desktop that has first class support for high-DPI displays. I also want to have some basic integration with the other system features provided by my distro, which increasingly means high-quality integration with NetworkManager and different systemd components. I want to get integrated notifications when a program segfaults on my computer or in case there's an SELinux AVC denial.