I'm a huge fan of Gnome shell. I always hated the typical desktop paradigm of desktop icons everywhere, cluttered. I love the clean and simple look, being able to just hit meta to bring up search and access everything in a few keystrokes.
Windows looks cluttered, OSX looks cluttered, KDE is cluttered AND complicated, Gnome shell is just so clean and simple and quick to interact with. Extensions are great too, even though all I have these days is Caffeine.
I recently watched a DistroTube episode [1] where he explains the many problems (cultural and technical) with the current Linux desktop environments, and he is very critical of Gnome, in particular. As an Ubuntu user with a very Emacs-centric workflow, it was slightly surprising to me, as I am quite happy with my Gnome setup, and I was not particularly aware of this "war" waging in the GUI dev world. However reading your comment I realize that I'm not alone in appreciating the extreme simplicity of Gnome, especially when it's almost entirely keyboard driven (I do everything I need by invoking the Super key). Caffeine is also the only extension I use, and my happiness would be truly complete with a keyboard shortcut for it, I think.
There's definitely a war, but it's mostly a war of attrition at this point. You're with one or the other, though the recent release of GNOME 40 has come with a lot more literature than previous releases, for better or worse. The GNOME team has been pushing for more dramatic breaking changes this time around, and it's gotten to the point where I, as a developer, can't really feel comfortable contributing to GNOME projects these days. If you're happy as a user though, more power to ya: open source software is highly subjective, so I totally get the appeal of a set-and-forget distro with a nice simple desktop. Going forwards though, it's going to be really interesting to see how KDE handles their increasingly massive technology stack, and how GNOME manages to expand on a relatively barren desktop. There are quite a few ideologies at play here, but only time will tell which ones are pervasive.
"There's definitely a war, but it's mostly a war of attrition at this point. You're with one or the other"
I really can't agree with this, I think both are great with their own unique strengths. Both projects can and do co-exist and don't really compete for resources.
Personally I need some of what you call clutter to be more productive. The GNOME top bar is wasted real estate because it shows nothing other than the time and basic controls. I prefer something close to GNOME2 where there are 2 panels. The top panel has my workspaces on the left and the time-date indicator and system tray on the right. The bottom panel exclusively has the open tasks on it.
Is it ugly and cluttered? possibly, but that's subjective. But do I need all of it? I think so.
Extensions can add all those things. Personally, I live in my browser and editor, so don't do a ton of switching between more than 2 apps at once (and often just have each on half the screen). Also I like the thin top bar. Less wasted space than a thick bar like Windows or KDE.
You're right, but extensions can also break when GNOME is updated. I'm personally more comfortable when the functionality is "baked into" or natively supported by the DE.
I am not sure if its a default include in gnome or if its a default from my distro (fedora), but my gnome install ships with an extension to enable the bottom bar.
Windows looks cluttered, OSX looks cluttered, KDE is cluttered AND complicated, Gnome shell is just so clean and simple and quick to interact with. Extensions are great too, even though all I have these days is Caffeine.