hello_hello [comrade/them]

Keyboard -> Keyboard shortcuts from Settings will show all the available keyboard shortcuts. You can also create your own custom keybindings

These seem like a lot of personal design complaints rather than actual issues with GNOME itself.

And to my understanding Gnome expects you to use basically every application with a full screen window anyway

You misunderstood, that’s not what GNOME expects at all. Your app not maximizing on startup is because the app doesn’t maximize on startup. GNOME doesn’t have a setting to maximize all apps by default since that should be the app’s responsibility.

If you want the auto-tiling window manager experience, you’ll need to install an extension (Paperwm, tiling shell, Forge, Pop shell). Extensions are like applications, there’s no shame in using them.

NixOS’s installer has been seeing a lot of work, I’m not aware of the a11y changes but it has been getting a lot simpler and compact.