The issue for me is more that they recreated the windows registry with all its flaws. For example, when uninstalling an app, can every entry associated with that app be easily removed?
The registry was supposed to improve upon dotfiles. In practice there is often one dotfile to delete versus hundreds of scattered registry entries. If an Android app is removed, the local settings are also completely removed, because they didn't just copy the design of windows.
This is unique on Windows. I actually took a look at dconf on my machine and no application occupied more than one key.
GEdit sits in /org/gnome/gedit and virt-manager in /org/virt-manager as you'd expect.
I also hate Android's behavior, since there are situations where you want to keep them. If I remove GEdit for whatever reason, I expect it to keep my settings.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize Gnome, but this isn't one of them. dconf is totally reasonable and has significant advantages over plain text.