Lol GNOME vs XFCE, that was absolutely the right decision XD
GNOME is worlds better.
And that decision wasn’t about which is better liked by the majority. It was (I’m paraphrasing) “the default shouldn’t put up hurdles for people with disabilities. Gnome supports accessibility techs X, Y, Z. Xfce only tech X.” That’s an objective metric. The same metric could still hold up for Gnome vs Plasma. Gnome might be ahead in that regard. I don’t know the current state. I know that years ago (Plasma 4.x days) adding a Japanese IME under Fedora Gnome was super easy thanks to PackageKit integration of the IME settings of Gnome while under Fedora’s Plasma session it was pretty much all manual configuration. Best out of the box accessibility is a metric I would wholeheartedly support even though my personal interest would prioritize gaming performance over screen readers because I simply don’t need the latter.