

APT has a fancy constraint solver included, it tries to satisfy all packages being compatible with each other. Packages have metadata. Example snippet from apt show sudo:
Depends: libapparmor1 (>= 2.7.0~beta1+bzr1772), [...]
Conflicts: sudo-ldap
Replaces: sudo-ldap
It needs all the stuff that’s in listed as a dependency, with the correct version, and it says you can’t have sudo-ldap at the same time. If I were to try and install sudo-ldap, it would yeet sudo. It does show you this and asks if you want to continue though.
In this case, this is by design, the sudo packagers made it so you can choose between the LDAP-enabled version of sudo and the regular version (most people don’t use LDAP).
But if you mix-and-match packages from various distros or versions of distros, it will have a hard time satisfying all the “Depends:” stuff, due to differences in versions and sometimes package names, and often it finds the “solution” is to uninstall a whole bunch of stuff.
I suspect you didn’t switch just the mirror, but to a different repository with different packages. Possibly a different version of Ubuntu.
Why is that Gnome’s fault please explain.