Pretty much, yes. It also used to be lighter in resource use than GNOME, though IDK if that’s still true. XFCE and LXQt are definitely lighter than both Gnome and Plasma, they are a lot more stable in the sense that they don’t change that much from release to release, and they play nice with third party window managers (e.g. tiling WMs).
Fair, although I never understood why people choose Mint and so on.
Plasma is so configurable that you can just make it look and act like you want, right?
So I guess it’s getting the GNOME experience (everything is simple, no setup) but with a classic desktop paradigm?
Pretty much, yes. It also used to be lighter in resource use than GNOME, though IDK if that’s still true. XFCE and LXQt are definitely lighter than both Gnome and Plasma, they are a lot more stable in the sense that they don’t change that much from release to release, and they play nice with third party window managers (e.g. tiling WMs).