On the other hand, when a project tries to please everybody it will undoubtedly regress into a mess of options, toggles, extra buttons, have an atrocious UX and only be usable for the 'in crowd'.
The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.
When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision":
The Gnome 3 adversity is ancient history at this point and in my opinion very much a fabricated feud to drive up news article engagement. Publishing an article with a few open bugs or a disagreeing opinion doesn't say much about the quality of the software in general.
I find the latest versions of Fedora with Gnome very usable, also in comparison with Windows/macOS. I don't have a need for very specific customisations and I think the Gnome people know it's but a tiny percentage of their users that use the very exotic features.
The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.