KDE has a much older and richer history than windows 7. It’s been trying to be a safe harbor for Windows users to land in Linux for a long time.
I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
You can...? I tried dragging from Dolphin, Kickoff and the Task Manager onto my desktop, and in all three cases it worked.
Granted, there's a moment of confusion having to choose between copying or linking, as offered by the context menu that pops up, but...
You can force moving by pressing Shift, or copying by pressing Control as a modifier.
You can make a context menu appear giving you an explicit choice by dragging with the right mouse button.
On KDE Plasma, the default is to give you the context menu.