> worst Canonicalisms
Do the Mint team treat fixing the other half of the problem, the GNOMEisms, as out-of-scope?
Asking because I maintain my own pile of gsettings and .gtkrc tweaks as mitigations yet pain points remain, apparently unfixable outside the source code.
I believe they more or less address GNOMEisms through the three desktop environments they support: Cinnamon (based on GNOME 3), MATE (based on a GNOME 2), and Xfce (based on more recent Gtk). I don't think they try to tame modern GNOME, and I wouldn't expect them to, since that would be an endlessly difficult moving target.
If you want more detail, you should ask someone who still uses Gtk-based desktops, or try them yourself. I gave up on Gtk a couple years ago.