Yeah, I’ve been running the latest Gnome on Arch for awhile and it’s really stellar performance upgrade. It’s worth noting that later releases of Gnome are now targeting less resource usage now that they’ve worked out most of the critical performance issues for high end hardware.
Same here. Been running it on Debian and it looks and works great. I'm relatively new to Linux (moved from macOS last year) so don't know much about the past, but I really don't get all the negative comments about Gnome the way it is today. It's a perfect way for a macOS user to get introduced to Linux too.
Most of the negativity is on ideological grounds - they don't like that it is "opinionated" and offers minimal customisation compared to KDE. And there's some backlash against the fact that a lot of the UI uses Javascript. (Though recent benchmarks have shown that it doesn't cause any kind of performance hit.)
Frankly, I don't think that Gnome is particularly un-customizable, it just does it in a different way, using extensions that you can install. I do occasionally try out new versions of KDE to see what I'm missing, and I'm always surprised how buggy/crashy it is.
But I wouldn't think that running GNOME on "old hardware" is a good idea anyway. Except for very generous interpretations of "old".