Urgh yes! As far as I understand this is all because extensions have to opt in and say "yes this works with the new gnome" or else it won't run so even if everything actually dies run fine, it won't work until an update is patched.

I do understand the gnome team wanting to guarantee a good user experience with extensions, but I can't help but think the damage caused by breaking every extension on every release is worse than some of them working unpredictably.

Gnome breaking all of System76 Cosmic extentions resulted in them saying "We rather make our own desktop instead of having to rework everything all the time".

The "workaround" I have found for this is to use a slow-updating, non-rolling distro; in my case it's Debian.