Concerning the rest of your points: Icons are one of the few things I never had an issue with in Gnome. ;-)
Concerning automated setups, the only system I care fore is Linux and am forced to use macOS. For my use cases, I don’t care about the tooling/possibilities for companies to install crap on my machine (my company does that). Using Ansible to automate my setup for macOS is theoretically possible, but such a crappy experience compared to Linux, that I don’t bother. Not to mention no unified installation/update system on macOS and the shitty default apps like Finder, Window management etc. The solution which sucks the least for me is using macOS as dump VPN driver for my virtual Linux box, so I can get shit done.
… no need to argue about bad Gnome defaults, it is trivial to disable all animations and the shell is fast enough even on my netbook. :-)