I think KDE has changed that much. A lot of work has gone into fixing the small things and making the default saner. The solid technology behind it + all the usability fixes they’ve been working on in the last years have made it really shine. I think it’s the culmination of years of work, and I think it’s finally paying off (also the fact that Valve is officially working on KDE will give it even more momentum).

There has been indeed a lot of changes in the last three years since Nate Graham started doing weekly update about all the stuff going on each week: https://pointieststick.com/

KDE has changed, and other environments have changed.

Used to be I disliked KDE for 3 reasons: 1. it made me feel like I was Doing It Wrong and stuff sometimes didn't work if I didn't use K- programs for everything (and I disliked basically all of those), 2) it was the worst-performing and heaviest (disk, memory, everything) DE around, and 3) the config was insane, in a bad way—not that you could do it, but the GUI config manager was just a damn mess.

1 has improved a ton, 3 has improved a little, and 2 isn't true anymore—Gnome is much heavier and has terrible performance by comparison (try both on a resource-constrained device if you don't believe me).

I wouldn't be surprised if XFCE has gotten a little heavier, too, so the difference between the two isn't so stark. Especially default installs of XFCE on some distros, which include a lot of extras.