Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.
All in all, I honestly don't really care about the changes they made to the dock. As long as my shortcut buttons work, I can deal with some small changes if they improve the polish of the system overall. I like the Gnome aesthetics that improve with every version, so I'm open to the tweaks made in Gnome 40.
I like the dock on the left of my screen and I'm happy that there is ways so everyone can customize this the way they want.
Seldom used applications don't make that cut, but they're... seldom used. I tend to switch to them using alt-tab rather than clicking through on the dock.
In general, I prefer using the keyboard, so I have never once wished that a dock was more prominent in GNOME. I'm glad it stays out of my way until I explicitly summon it with a keypress.