I use KDE now but I agree. It very blandly utilitarian. Bland gradients of bland greys and bland blues. Even Windows 95 had more personality with its saturated red-grey and bold colours.

KDE does not spark joy, but then again, most devs and most users have no real artistic sensibility to speak of. Have you ever looked at a random person's desktop? So I don't give weight to anybody that says "it looks good to me."

That said, I am now on KDE after a decade of GNOME because I need some of its configurability, and GNOME is starting to become too opinionated even for me, even though they have a slightly better design team not afraid of colours with more than 20% saturation.