Certainly the much greater variety of options, of control are better than gnome shell.
There had been something about a somewhat ephemeral clunkyness that keeps me drifting back to GS. Perhaps I'll revisit now I'm using a desktop more often (as opposed to a laptop).
It certainly lost market share in the wilderness years when they decided to rewrite the whole thing. What was that? Like 10 years ago?
Plasma Desktop 4 was the version that lost them a lot of users, yes. It has slowly been recovering. The past few releases have been good. I still have some issues when running with Wayland, but that's not just a Plasma problem.
One thing I have to give GNOME is their focus on cohesiveness, which KDE still struggles with. It can be annoying to have one application with a full menu, another with a hamburger, and yet others with just toolbars, and on top of that some with their own version of headerbars - all under the KDE umbrella.