I might be misunderstanding you, but dragging down from the top bar in GNOME while a window is maximized results in the same behaviour as grabbing the window’s toolbar. So you can still move the window around when dragging down from the top bar. This has been the default behaviour for a long time (maybe since GNOME 3? unsure)
It’s almost as if every DE has their own design philosophy they stick to. The minority of loud, hateful circlejerking around GNOME developers because the DE doesn’t fit arbitrary personal preferences is so bizarre.
This ain’t Windows or macOS. You can install a whole new DE that looks how you want and provides all the niche customization options you want. And here’s the kicker: you can do that and simply stop caring about GNOME at all, even to the point you don’t feel like leaving comments like this.
Or like, fork GNOME. All the energy spent devaluing the work of — in many cases unpaid — hobbyist contributors is a bit sick at this point. At points it’s devolved into direct harassment of individuals. And yet, nobody has bothered to fork GNOME. It’s toxic freak behaviour and we shouldn’t be accepting this as the norm in open source.