It is a feature which replace another feature (stack based switching). It broke my flow multiple times a day for three years until I got a Windows machine again. I guess we are just differently wired, the idea of stopping to consider which shortcurt to use was neither natural nor possible for me at that age (around 30).

KDE does this perfectly however. It defaults to Windows/classic Gnome 2 behaviour but can easily be configured however one wants it.