Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I’m curious as well, as I missed quite many Gnomes. I used it back in Gnome-2 days, and now it’s 45. I think I accidentally tried it a couple of years back (43, if I’m not wrong) and I like it so much that I use it till this day. Combining with Swaywm on my laptop, but sometimes I think that I like Gnome even more. Which is quite a statement! As I really love Sway and thought that’s the final thing I’ll ever use as a DE.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.