You most certainly can customise it, the previous version of Nobara had GNOME looking like windows. Not only can, but need to. Try starting out from default GNOME, and then compare it to what comes with distros. It's essentially unusable if you don't spend a lot of time and effort to customize it in order to have the basic functionality you'd expect coming from Windows.
This is what Linux needs. One single user experience for all. It needs a champion to sell it to normal less tech savvy people. As much I love KDE and QT, Gnome is the way to go.
GNOME is bad, and even if it wasn't, you most certainly don't need a one true DE. If you want that, you can go right back to win or mac.