GNOME developers are "rethinking" the Activities button that appears by default in GNOME Shell's Top Bar. Feedback shows that the "Activities" label as-is
Why'd you switch from i3? If it was for Wayland support, in case you didn't know, the Sway window manager is basically a drop-in replacement for i3, but for Wayland rather than X11. You can literally copy/paste your i3 config into ~/.config/sway/ and it will only need a few minor tweaks to get fully working!
I just made the switch this past week. The one caveat is Polybar doesn't work correctly with Sway, so I had to configure Waybar instead. Waybar has some cool features though, like being able to place the tray anywhere you want, so it was worth the effort to switch.
I don't use Wayland at all, though I am aware of Sway.
I switched to Pop and GNOME because... for lack of better phrasing, I wanted a more normal experience that I could recommend others. I used Void and i3 for about 6 years (Arch + i3 for years before that) and just wanted something I could recommend to new users and support them as well (hard to support something I don't use myself). Pop and GNOME with the tiling features is a happy medium for me. Far from perfect, but good enough.
Gotcha, fair enough! I run Arch with Gnome on my desktop gaming rig for similar reason, I just wanted a normal DE that I didn't have to tweak much. Laptop is where I have Sway/Waybar and experiment with different window managers and such.