GTK3/4 alone not really, as my Linux netbook is doing just fine with XFCE.
Now having GNOME with its Javascript based shell and extensions, making every click take a couple of seconds longer and me wondering what it is doing, no thanks.
The javascript is used mostly to drive the shell GUI, it shouldn't be taking seconds off all your mouse clicks. If there is really bad slowness, you should consider reporting that as a bug, it may not be the javascript that's at fault. The performance shouldn't be any worse than a typical lightweight web app running in firefox. That is of course if you ever end up using GNOME again for whatever reason.
I don't understand why you have to wonder what it's doing, the javascript is all self-contained and hosted locally. It's not using npm or anything like that. And the extensions are pretty much the same as any other app you use that supports plugins.
I don't understand what the issue here is or what you want me to learn, those seem to all be bugs that were already fixed. If there are additional unfixed problems that others aren't aware of, and you're not making it up, then please mention those, and maybe I can help you get them reported.
The issue here is that those bugs should never have made it to 'prod'. For absolute die hard fans who say "Gnome or bust", you encounter a bug, you report it, track it, get it fixed, and things are better, until next time the same high level symptom - UI slowness - is introduced, through a different mechanism making it a "different" bug.
Thing is, not everyone is a die hard fan. Developers on Gnome, by definition, are, but outside of that, customers are going to go with what works. And that's not Gnome. Customer's don't care that the UI slowness in version 1 was caused by X, and UI slowness in version 2 was caused by Y. There was UI slowness, which made it unusable, and, well, now they're using XFCE or OS X or Windows. It doesn't matter that there was a bug and it was fixed a year ago. The problem is that there was a bug a year ago, and that particular customer is gone and can't be recaptured - they've got a solution that works and they're not looking to switch to a different one. Especially one that has a history of problems.
This site asks for 1.5 Go of ram https://ubuntugnome.org/, Ubuntu 20.04 asks for 4 Go of ram. Compared to the 30 Mo for IceWM in the article (apple to oranges, I know, but still 3 orders of magnitude), or the 300 Mo for KDE. The author also notes that since XFCE switched to GTK3 they use more resources. That seems to be plenty of basis in reality. Perhaps you mean something else by "resource intensive"?
Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. Even OP consumes just about a gigabyte of RAM with all the programs on their Raspberry Pi.
That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it is, especially when compared to desktop environments that were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.
> Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone.
That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're right, I could have clarified that part.
