It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise customers. The intended user population is very different.
I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect, ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly fine to install on a random laptop.
Not necessarily with that line of thought, Red-Hat has already acknowledged many years ago that there is no money to be made on the GNU/Linux desktop (Mandrake, SuSE and Canonical also found out years later).
If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs, you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering, like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's enterprise customers first and any use you get out of them is a happy afterthought.
Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various other directions that people are pulling in. It might be the case coincidentally for some things, but that could be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.