their pivot from highly customisable kde-like experience to look more mac-like actually dropped that 80% towards 0 for me.
Also, fundamentally: for a Desktop ui to ask by default for more than one bar to stick into your desktop space is just greedy.
GNOME is opinionated as heck (often to its detriment), but it does not look/feel like macOS. GNOME looks orders of magnitude nicer than modern macOS. Rounded corners and an appreciation for some (poorly defined) ethos of "simplicity" is not the core of macOS. Implying GNOME is appreciably like macOS is as embarrassing as calling KDE a Windows knockoff. There are genuinely many many reasons to hate GNOME, but being closer to macOS than Windows on some wildly truncated spectrum of UI/UX is not one of them.
When the Alto was the only thing with windows, everything that followed looked like a Xerox Exec clone. Fifty years later, that argument rings as hallow as saying every novel is just a retelling of $LOCALITY_BASED_FIRST_NARRATIVE_FICTION.