You are right. I should have checked this more carefully. Thanks for
the correction.

It should read something like this:

Mate (rhymes with latte) is GNOME 2 and it re-names everything to
prevent conflicts with GNOME 3 counterparts, so you can have both
installed. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3 made to look like GNOME
Classic (Mint version, not Ubuntu version with top and bottom panel
and Applications, Places and System). Mate is still rough, but
Cinnamon is maturing nicely. You need to be a Mint fan to like either
(panel at bottom with a slab menu and Mint theming). Either way you do
not get the old GNOME 2.x look and feel. You get old Mint look and
feel which was not standard GNOME.

The advantage that Cinnamon has over Mate, IMO, is that it is built on
GNOME 3 and that means that its apps will be upgraded while Mate's GTK
2 apps will die on the vine. They are not being maintained and will
grow stale, if they are not already so.