I fled my beloved Gnome for KDE when all the padding and giant buttons showed up and all the configurability disappeared from view (yes I know about gnome-tweaks). If I have to go to xfce to retain a desktop experience someday, I’ll do it. Having said that, I REALLY like KDE, so I hope it doesn’t come to that.
I did not buy a 4k monitor so designers could add padding and an unreasonable amount of white space between everything or try to make my triple monitor desktop setup a “phone”.