For me it kinda always went something like this:

"Hey can I have window labels on my taskbar? And maybe quicklaunch. Also can I type in paths in the file manager?"

KDE: "Sure no prob."

GNOME: "You are an enemy of Christ."

I don't really like to talk about it on here because people are very hostile towards GNOME and its users, but I used it (extensionless, tweakless) for about 4 years up until recently. Very comfy and efficient workflow in my opinion. I think a lot of people don't take the time to understand how it works, they get frustrated and want their alt-tabbing and minimizing back. Either way I don't really care. No emotional attachment to any DE, and I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.

Because putting QoL improvements and having an effective workflow behind a bunch of plugins that break on the tiniest Gnome update is all part of the user experience I guess. I've given it several tries over the past 20 years or so, but each attempt eventually ended in utter disappointment.

I like GNOME's workflow, more importantly it breaks less often than KDE does for me. My fiance's computer uses KDE because it has a more Windows-like UI, it's also the one that runs into weird graphical glitches and issues.

Examples, we plugged the new TV into it to watch something recently, since then the lock screen started glitching the fuck out having two different clocks flickering overtop of each other, even back on the original monitors.

New headphones didn't work right away because it had defaulted to an incompatible audio stream, changing it was buried under three different menus... we knew it wasn't the headphones because they worked fine with my computer, using GNOME. I've never had to dig through settings like that to use headphones with any other OS or desktop environment, but I did with KDE.

From the sheer amount of people that recommend KDE I have to assume that for most people it works, and that's great. My experience is that it's buggy and fiddly to use, GNOME for me is not. It's what I use on my main computer so that I don't have to troubleshoot stupid shit when I get off work. I like the less cluttered UI and the multi-desktop focused layout, plus it feels WAY more polished than KDE which has always felt jank to me.

I guess I'm one of the few people who matches gnome pretty well. I actually appreciate that the default is 90% of what I need, and don't mind if the last 10% is maintained outside of the core project. Scope creep and all that.

You don't even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed "Other locations" where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don't give an easy "you got 10 gigs left mate." I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.

GNOME used to be good until version 2. Then the developers went insane and all subsequent versions of GNOME feel like they've been designed by someone who has never worked in his life.

My conspiracy theory is that it is pushed so much by Red Hat because they have optimized it to be as boring and distraction free as possible to increase productivity in an enterprise context. It is useless outside of that.

I mean there must be people who want this and nothing else,

Honestly I am on gnome, because I do not know shit about linux. I did not even know what gnome or plasma were, when I started, barely still understand the difference even now. I just picked some distros that were recommended for a total noob coming from windows, and stuck with the one I liked the best.

I didnt try KDE and only used GNOME and XFCE, but i guess it's easy and clean side. I immediately get a hold of most applications, and everything feels polished without touching anything. And when i want to get something specific, i'm generally fine with complex tweakings, so the weird ways of finetuning it don't really bother me.