I don't know what you mean by that. It's a locale, it has nothing to do with KDE or Plasma. It doesn't even need a desktop environment. Plasma Settings will just pick up the ones you have installed.
I suspect a great part of the issues are due to reuse of some dotfiles… right now I’m trying to pin down exactly what borks my wayland login, since it works for a newly created user and I don’t want to reconfigure all of plasma again. I wish we had at least all config files in one place. The status quo is maddening.
no, no - the opposite is the actual problem: you extract in a non-empty folder and there’s no top directory in the archive. Now you have a bunch of files mixed up: the extracted ones and the ones that were there before you did it.