It used to be the de facto FOSS desktop in the GNOME 2.x days but things changed with the release of Gnome 3 and I’ve not really noticed Gnome ever bounce back since.
KDE is quite popular for personal computers I believe. It's got things like HDR support much earlier than Gnome did.
Corporate also seems to like OpenSUSE and RHEL. Universities seem to like Debian. Practically all of them default to Gnome or offer Gnome equivalently.
Even several (relatively) big SteamOS-alikes are using Gnome despite SteamOS itself defaulting to KDE.
Your use-cases are hardly average. I don't think I ever encountered 150MB image or folder with 300 videos. I don't even use nautilus outside of the very niche cases. I'm using Chromium or Terminal or VScode or Idea 99% of time. My GNOME is just a shell switching windows. Whatever file managers, image viewers or other stuff bundled with GNOME matters little for me, I can easily replace them. I don't even understand the concept of DE, this is just wasted work to maintain those apps. They even develop their own browser...
A computer should have no problems at all dealing with a 150MB image or 300 videos. I'm invoking cmuratori here. What do you think you are getting out of running defense for objectively broken/unusable software?
It used to be the de facto FOSS desktop in the GNOME 2.x days but things changed with the release of Gnome 3 and I’ve not really noticed Gnome ever bounce back since.