Having pushed out an application to a stack of workstations, I was looking for an easy command line way to programmatically add it to the favourite / side-bar in Gnome. Annoyingly, the only method I found (the one Google finds with “00-favorite-apps” doesn’t work) has to be run as the actual user and only does one user at a time.
dbus-launch gsettings set org.gnome.shell favorite-apps "['google-chrome.desktop', 'nautilus.desktop', 'gnome-terminal.desktop', 'blender.desktop', 'Autodesk-Maya2022.desktop']"