Yes the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative helped a lot making KDE suck less in this regard. A lot of configuration dialogs were improved, a lot of small irritating bugs were fixed and the default are more sane now. And because Nate Graham blog about all these changes every week, KDE also got a lot of new contributors.

Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.