Now, I have always loved GNOME, but I spent the last few months in KDE. That was until I switched back to GNOME a couple of weeks ago. I know it's disliked by a lot of people, but some of these changes, like accent colors and the libadwita file save/open interface, really solidify this desktop my favorite.
I'm not a Linux beginner but I like gnome because it's polished and the opinionated defaults work ok for me. I don't really want to spend much time thinking about my DE. I understand why people like KDE or tiling WMs, I just don't want to dedicate much time tweaking settings. Although I'm mainly a laptop user and just use the WM to open a web browser, so simple gesture navigation and workspaces is enough.
it's definitely a really nice out of the box experience for any level of user. I installed it for my gf having not used it in years and it's really very slick now. I like i3 on a laptop personally but I could happily use gnome on a desktop these days