Gnome is a DE designed to be used by distributions.
Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.
The only distributions which don’t are GnomeOS which is intended for developing Gnome, and Fedora, which is intended to be a bleeding edge distribution to mass release stuff before it’s included in RHEL.
Turns out, however, that a lot of people actually like the default Gnome look and so are happy with using Fedora.
But in practice this isn’t an issue for anyone because their distribution will come with an application launcher.
And even better you can completely change and/or add an application launcher because they are implemented through extensions.
Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.
The only distributions which don’t are GnomeOS which is intended for developing Gnome, and Fedora, which is intended to be a bleeding edge distribution to mass release stuff before it’s included in RHEL.
Turns out, however, that a lot of people actually like the default Gnome look and so are happy with using Fedora.
But in practice this isn’t an issue for anyone because their distribution will come with an application launcher.
And even better you can completely change and/or add an application launcher because they are implemented through extensions.