KDE not only has 1 mascot, they have over 6 or more mascots!! Yet GNOME only has the foot, that’s interesting, they need a mascot. And made by Tyson Tan or someone with a similar art style, it would be amazing!!! But anyway GNOME is the best desktop environment and it’s better if it’s vanilla with some small customizations.
I think they’re happy with just a slightly silly foot logo. “Gnome Network Object Model Environment” is a serious sounding name and I don’t think an animal mascot is what they had in mind for branding (seeing as, they don’t have one). An anime gnome might even be the exact opposite of what their intent is. GNOME is looking to be seen as a professional alternative to MacOS and Windows. Speaking of which, note that Windows and OSX don’t have a mascot either.
Gnome Chomsky.
Windows had Clippy then Cortana.
Gnome Chomsky would be pretty hilarious. Kinda political though.
True, Windows had a couple characters (well, Clippy was for Office). The idea of those was a digital assistant character though, not really a mascot.