Sway and i3 are excellent, but they're clearly not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend them for people new to Linux, or who just want a normal desktop experie

Sway and i3 are excellent, but they're clearly not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend them for people new to Linux, or who just want a normal desktop experience. For a notion of what GNOME ought to be, I'd point in the direction of lightweight environments like XFCE or LXDE or MATE. None of them are perfect, but in my experience XFCE at least was more stable than GNOME. Lightweight window managers don't provide things like settings for your wifi card (maybe XFCE does now). The point isn't that desktop Linux users shouldn't have a graphical interface for wifi. The point is that this should be independent of the window manager. Same for power management and mounting filesystems and so on. If GNOME provided a clean framework for these things it would be okay. Instead they've recreated the Windows registry.