The trick to not have gnome 3 crash (at least when I was on Ubuntu 18.04?) was to NOT connect it to heavy online accounts like if you have three google accounts all of which are perpetually teetering on the edge of your storage capacity of 15GB (or 17, if you did the security checkup) then the "factories" of Gnome will work themselves to death trying to synchronize everything. But we can't tell people "Just don't connect gnome to any online account if $special_conditions" feels like a gotcha.
I have it connected to 4 accounts with a lot of data/events, over ~3 years nothing happened. I did encounter crashes initially due to some nvidia driver issue :| and another time due to my ram stick, otherwise it's more stable than macos.
I've had it connected to Business Google Drive subscription with a ton (>1TB) of data on it. Never had any problems. Didn't ask it to sync locally though.
Don't know which exact version it was, but I was using Ubuntu 20.04 at the time.
XFCE here, for the same reason - I've been trying out Gnome since the early 2000s and it's always been a bug-ridden, bloated pig. Meanwhile XFCE is simple, lightweight and it just works.
