Gnome is written by, just hear me out, Malus workers in their offtime who got screamed at by Steve Jobs for misplacing a button by a few pixels. They wanted to write a Mac interface without some tech dictator breathing down their neck, but with the same philosophy of "we know what's best for the users".
Gnome is good as it doesn't had a lot of complexity and looks nice out of the box.
I do wish the gnome devs would be a little more flexible. However, I also wish KDE had a dumb mode that disables the customization. Xfce4 has a kiosk mode
So, here's a thought. Instead of removing customization, people just, you know, not customize things. It's like going into the Settings page, except instead of doing that, you don't do that.
You underestimate my power, I see a Settings menu, and instantly enter a fugue state, 30 minutes pass and I suddenly come back to myself, my desktop environment looks entirely different, the windows are wobbly, and GTK window theming is broken.
Here's my complete KDE post-install configuration procedure: go into Settings, search for "Numlock" and change it to "on at boot". It used to include changing Single Click - selects files, but that's the default now, as natural law would demand.
I would posit to you that it is, in fact, the perfect amount of complicated. If I want to change something, I don't have to program and/or install an extension that will get blown up on the next release of the desktop environment because of the lack of fucks that Gnome gives for people that build extensions for it.
I will concede that it would nice to have dconf. But considering the amount of stuff that can be configured in stock Plasma, that might take a lot more than the 3 settings that Gnome allows you to change.
You shouldn't be using gnome if you are wanting to make major changes. That's the whole point. If you like to tweak things and customize KDE is great and I respect that. However, not everyone wants that especially not on a machine that is for work.