All of these claims clash with the reality of so many core open source projects, used by private users and massive corporations alike, that rely on single voluntary developers or super small groups which receive no flowers and no donations.

dock

Not a permanent dock. Docks predate Apple any way.

activities (somewhat e mix between Apple’s mission control and launchpad

GNOME 3 was officially launched a few months after OS X Lion, but combined these things into one first.

How it manages to use up more resources than KDE is beyond me.

It can happen when you have to develop all your technology on your own instead of relying on the work of a hundred-million dollar company that does the heavy lifting for you.

What does the founder of GNOME have to do with GNOME in 2022? He worked for Microsoft for 6 years.

Right, Midnight Trains was a French company trying to create a European night train network that centred on France, specifically on Paris. I think they found out the hard way that for various reasons, as they detailed in their blog, France might not be the best country in which to organise such a company; it also might have been simply too ambitious of a project for the current market.