This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat, who basically decides everything related to systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
