I have the opposite experience. I have no trouble navigating Gnome apps, and now when selecting an application for a task, I'll choose a Gnome or GTK4 one first. Other apps implement odd controls that don't mesh with the rest of the system.

To me Gnome mostly feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy. And I guess that's what they did, and they did a good job.

omg yes, I felt crazy the first time I experienced this "feature"