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.
GNOME2 definitely felt more Windows-like than after GNOME 3.
GNOME is definitely its own thing in terms of workflow, but noobs will always seek an understood point of reference, and the closest thing to it is probably MacOS.