The amount of straight up invented stuff in that blog post is worrying. It's like somebody glanced at the history of the past 25 years of Linux desktop development and then decided to write an AU fan fiction of it.

I read it, and the author speaks with such authority, but at the same time the things he said doesn't seem to match what I know and saw.

There was a lot of drama in the Linux desktop world, but fear of being sued by MS is not something I've ever heard even being mentioned in passing.

Gnome having OSX envy though, that's something everybody were taking about.

It's funny, because the real inspiration for many of the GNOME post-2.x era designs was webOS—which also inspired macOS/iOS, Android, and Windows

The two parties I blame for the mess are: GNOME with their "we know best and you're just to like it" attitude, and Ubuntu with their equally harmful "we want to do it our way even though a better alternative already exists".

Interestingly enough, both GNOME and Ubuntu is sticking with this even today, so they never learned anything.

we are sticking with the “after 25 years we kind of know what we’re doing” strategy because, unsurprisingly, it has worked: GNOME is the most used desktop environment on Linux. The good part is that, if you don’t like what we’re doing, you can use something else or, and I know this might be a step too far, you can take advantage of the license and do your own thing. There’s also the option of joining us though that requires you compromise with other people.

isnt it a default choice rather than a user choice? A lot of distros ship with Gnome by default.

You're overestimating how many people change their default, especially when that involves installing a completely different environment. Sure: some people do that, and some people end up liking tiling window managers more than a complete environment; but even on Linux people tend to stick to the default of their distro. It's more likely they'll distro-hop rather than install KDE on Ubuntu, or Sway on Fedora.