I think I'm the weird one who likes different DEs for different use-cases

Gnome is great on a laptop with a track pad. It feels a bit like MacOS with its gestures and how it behaves. I did try also installing hyprland on it to try it out. I like the idea of a tiling WM but getting a setup 'just right' sounds like an exercise in patience I don't have when other solutions exist that are good enough.

On my main desktop that I use a mouse to navigate, KDE all the way.

On the few VMs that I run GUI apps on, I like LXQT (Lubuntu or Debian) for how few resources it uses.