I enjoy KDE more than Gnome nowadays but it's far from being more minimalistic; it has way too much options, applications, dropdowns, buttons, etc. compared to Gnome and pretty much any other DE.

It DOES run great though, but I think they'd do a good job by simplifying some aspects of it, too bad the community seems to be mostly opposed to that as they want KDE to remain a more power-user friendly desktop.

I haven't tried it out in awhile, but I wonder if LXQt might be worth looking at for something more configurable than GNOME, yet more simple than KDE. Of course, there's also always XFCE, MATE, and Cinnamon. I just don't see LXQt mentioned much.

I think the parent comment's choice of "minimal work" was key. In my experience, KDE requires quite a bit of work to set up because it encourages you to adapt the system for your workflow. GNOME, on the other hand, encourages you to adapt your workflow to the system, which is minimal out-of-the-box, and IMO doesn't take much effort or work to do so.

Regardless, I think once KDE is set up to one's workflow properly, it stays out of the way and can remain out of the way on new systems by transferring the config files. It just may take a lot of upfront work to get to that point and you can get easily distracted tweaking the minutiae over time. For that particular reason, I also prefer just using vanilla GNOME (with only the AppIndicator extension for DropBox and Steam tray icons). Granted, that's a "me problem" because I get easily distracted and can never stick with a specific setup when there's so many options available for me to tweak.

TL;DR: Both KDE and GNOME can be minimal, but the latter requires "minimal work" because it's minimal out-of-the-box and there's not much work that can be done.

I prefer Gnome but I also use KDE because that's what's on my Steam Deck.

Both work great and have all the features I need, but KDE feels a bit boring, a bit "Windows XP" while Gnome seems like a more modern desktop to me. I much prefer Gnome's dock to KDE's "start menu" with so many things cramed at the same place (well, like Windows).