Click on "Activities" in the upper-left corner. (One of the few desktop UI elements.) It is exactly the same thing as pushing the Super key. A search bar pops up, start typing to search (EDIT: no 2nd click needed).
They recently (late 2022 maybe) released Gnome Tour which explains this stuff to new users. Admittedly it's too late for people already on Ubuntu or something, but discoverability of these features is getting better.
Even in this article they mention adding a widget that displays shortcuts.
Which is terrible UI. Let's force the user to turn a flow they could do at any time by clicking a single button at the bottom of their desktop into a context switch into another window, followed by the same button click. Or know about the Magic Keyboard short cut, then type in multiple characters, then press enter. So in any case we're turning a single input into multiple inputs just to open a commonly used app.
What are you comparing to? Windows has worked that way for 30 years (Start menu) and most users seem to figure it out fine. So do smartphones (home button). macOS is the only prominent example I can think of which shows icons of closed apps on the screen at all times by default.
