Gnome to me was like a DE trying really hard to be like Mac, I don't want that. I didn't want any of what Gnome 3 was offering and I still don't.
I have a Debian VM that I jump into to try out latest KDE and Gnome just to see how things are and I honestly do not want what Gnome is still trying to offer.
So I'd happily shit on it and then find that corner of it to hook out the remaining crap from my butt cheeks.
I'm glad you like it, but allow other to have their own opinion without making the assumption that people have simply not used it and that's why they dislike it so hard.
Depends what I'm doing, where and how. I do use tmux everywhere though but at home xfce-terminal, At work I tend to use terminator for the wonders of group control but if connecting from a windows pc i'll be on windows-terminal.
For shell I try to use zsh everywhere with p10k and omz.