The consistency is one of the things it gets right, but it’s undermined by its sheer bare-bonesness, which brings people to try to augment it with extensions, but those constantly break due to functioning by way of monkeypatching GNOME internals.

I think the idea of a “blank slate” DE that you build up with extensions is actually great, but a highly capable stable extension API is non-optional for that to actually work. I can’t have half my customizations vanishing or breaking overnight due to a system update.