You've missed the part where they have no intention of replacing it. It's bloat. And I agree with them.
Where relevant they've added stuff as a core part of the panel, like recently an indicator for VPN connections. If you want to use an application you can alt-tab to it, like we've done for decades. Everything else is relegated to media controls and notifications. Appindicators are legacy at this point, and they systematically get cut from modern designs like mobiles.
Familiarity breeds contempt, give it some time and I'm sure cosmic will have its share of haters too. There's hundreds of gnome devs, and all you're seeing are clickbait blogposts like these made to stir up the pot. Go check out the discussions on discourse, matrix, or even gitlab to see what they're actually like.
You can check this post post about why gnome has done away with appindicators. Basically everyone has their own and it's a mess, they're very much not bringing them back, appindicators are being replaced altogether by the notification system.
Gaming on linux is a decades old ongoing effort, there's plenty of praise to go around, vulkan and winehq, dxvk...
C'est le cercle vicieux où la télé vire de plus en plus facho pour jouer pour son audience qui du coup s’extrémise aussi, et contrairement aux autres médias y'a plus de nouveau sang pour équilibrer. La télé c'est surtout les boomers qui la regarde maintenant.
Gnome's ui is a couple of extensions away from being windows-like. You don't need to subscribe to the full gnome experience™ to use gnome.
Botnets work as background malware, most people never realize they're infected, as opposed to in your face malware like ransomware.
Backups are only relevant for malware if you can pinpoint when the malware was installed and the backups aren't compromised.
Winetricks has a setting to toggle virtual desktop if you want; however virtual desktop is barely maintained so you probably should switch to gamescope .
The system seems already implemented, even if not yet deployed. Anyhow you're giving last epoch way too much credit here, deterministic crafting is nothing new.
Notifications, you can have the app fire a notification when it's synced or disconnects for example. Gnome is working on better notifications right now. Tablets, chromebooks, cell phones... have been doing fine without appindicators; people just have a hard time changing their habits.