When developing Gnome in July 2019 it came to my attention that the settings I had created and saved in ~/.config/dconf/user were not applied into the system.

Updates came in /etc/skel/.config/dconf/user.

We did the skel command (check your aliases) but the new settings like icon, wallpaper, themes, …

Dconf is a kind of database that keeps track of all the settings of Gnome. You can only edit it via dconf-editor.

Tip 

Copy/paste the /etc/skel/.config/dconf/user manually over to ~/.config/dconf/user

and check and recheck

then reboot