They do on a lot of systems still, including most Fedora Workstation users — a group of people who will be seeing this in a production-release operating system reallllly realllly soon now. And, for better or worse, we also live in a world where pretty significant system updates are a regular occurrence.
I personally think the change to a “ready to act!” start is good, and probably won’t shock people too much, but I also want to be really sensitive to the feedback we’re getting. I am also feeling some pain when restarting (not with this but with workspace setup), and think this is an area we could definitely improve.
For example, if Firefox was previously running when the system was last shut down, GNOME Shell could restart it and put its windows back where they were. (And Firefox itself will try its best to take care of putting the content back where it was.)
And perhaps over time as more apps become more robust in this way, they could also do the same. I have a dream that Flatpaks could — on intentional shutdown and also periodically — use CRIO and come back right where they were.
In this case, Overview would only come up on login if you are truly starting a fresh session.