I can kind of say the same for elementary, never been much of a fan of it, but I think the innovations they brought helped the GNOME team A LOT with actually moving forward with the vision they have for the project.

The 1:1 gestures, the rounded corners (without going too far on those, like deepin likes to do), the system integration for light/dark modes (instead of the more hack-y theme option that we’ve been using for years), the horizontal navigation of the workspaces, these are all things elementary was implementing for a while and which GNOME soon followed, which ends up being great for everyone that uses both of them.