It’s sort of annoying that they removed that feature in the first place. Recently, I’ve been using the Nala frontend for APT, since it maintains history similar to DNF/yum, so I try to install all packages through the command-line. The Ubuntu App Center has always been a mild disaster…
I think that a lot of the recent GNOME design choices are merely because they’re trying to improve usability on mobile devices. It also just so happens that Apple is trying to make the macOS desktop closer to iOS to encourage people to move from Windows. They have similar goals, which leads to similar design choices. And all design is derivative, anyway. Who cares.