Meanwhile there is a slightly larger minority that need things that cannot be done in X.
For the vast majority of people they cannot tell the difference, either works just fine. If there are issues they are tiny things they don't notice until somebody points it out - and then they forget in a few days.
And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.
But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.
Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.
I can see the appeal of KDE - I just got fed up of things breaking when I did mandatory upgrades for security. I don't have to choose between stability and security. After 10+ years, I would find it harder to go pecking through menus for what I need when I can just type it.