There are touchscreen extensions for Gnome specifically, but maybe there is something in gnome-tweaks that changes dock behavior that will work for you.
There are also different default dock setups that differ by distro, so may be helpful to know what you are working with. Example: Ubuntu has dock enabled by default, but Fedora does not.
For touchscreen in Fedora, I just hit the top-left to open all apps like on a phone, then scroll through from there. Everything works as expected with touch.