pushed useless crap like the activity view to people

This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.

slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.

Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?

They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).

They removed it because nobody wanted to maintain the code, which was generally agreed to be subpar, and it was blocking development elsewhere in Nautilus. They acknowledge it was a dumb idea to implement this functionality inside of Nautilus in the first place when they should have done it in the shell. They realized they were leaving users in the lurch here, so offered a few solutions like installing Nemo Desktop. They even developed a GNOME shell extension prototype before removing it that users could move straight to.

Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?

It wasn't part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.

Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.