To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:

- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)

- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars

- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus

- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)

- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus

- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)

- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code

While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.