It's not bloated, it just has lots of options. If you like someone else to decide everything for you: buy a Mac or use gnome. But KDE is not for you then. Don't try to make it into something it was never meant to be.

I use Cinnamon. Less bloat, more coherent, still plenty of options

Yeah cinnamon is basically a remake of Gnome 2, from before the devs went batshit crazy and went more opinionated than Apple. It's not bad but I really prefer KDE, also because I think Qt is a much better desktop framework than GTK is.

But what things in KDE do you consider 'bloat'?

I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.

Are you suggesting that avoiding client-side window decorations in favor of the traditional server-side approach is bad UX?

*It causes bad UX.

Are you being purposefully controversial (to not say trollish)?

To the exact contrary to what you assert, one of the prominent argument against Gnome that I've been seing times and times again in DE debates, is the "dogmatic" opposition to SSD from the Gnome project.

I think clunky and bloated both describe KDE actually

They're not arguing with you, they're yes-anding you. Read as "ah a one word opinionated description...let's steelman that. here's my one-word opinionated term: clunky. Here's what smells make me get that vibe. What smells contribute to the bloat one? :)"

Doubling down on short judge-y stacatto contributes to an aggressive "I don't need to tell you" vibe that would be sassy and fun, maybe, if in person. In writing online comments, it just means we need to get a 3rd comment from you before we get to anything I'm interested in (I don't particularly care what your one word description is, I don't know you)

One person's "bloat" is another person's "batteries included".

Cinnamon includes all the batteries I've ever needed without feeling bloated

KDE Wallet though?

Funny, I used to think it was bloat but then I got to use it to store passwords for remote servers accessed with ssh, and now it's a nice 'batteries included' for me, as GP mentioned. It has become so because it is nicely and seamlessly integrated.

Gnome has the same thing, and it's equally as annoying. Also you can just disable it if you really don't want it.

What about it?

If you think that then don't install everything under the sun or choose a better distro. You can just install only Plasma Desktop, Doplhin and the handful of utilities you actually use, you know?

xfce remains the best GUI for Linux (outside of the tiling WMs which are far superior). No I will never change my mind.