Chris on Coder Radio has talked about the different DEs before. His explanation of it I still think is one of the better ones. KDE just has a higher cognitive

Chris on Coder Radio has talked about the different DEs before. His explanation of it I still think is one of the better ones. KDE just has a higher cognitive load. You have the control menu, you have drop downs, you could have a button on the bottom, GNOME apps are just simpler. You have all this busyness in the menus while GNOME apps can be just simpler to get into, use, and find things. Not to say GNOME is going in the right direction. I use Cinnamon on Manjaro for a reason. Client Side Decorations have been horrible for some apps. Like gedit, the UI is so horrible GNOME can't even get people to maintain it and had to put out a public call. While Cinnamon's Xed editor looks like old gedit and works great. But overall, GNOME apps are just easier to use.