This isn't particularly useful or accurate. The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things.

Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution.

Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.