Seems like I'm the outlier here that prefers Gnome over KDE. Gnome feels more polished than KDE for me. Granted KDE comes with more features out of the box, but I don't find anything lacking in Gnome for me.
Tried KDE long time ago to compare it to Gnome 3, went back to Gnome. Tried KDE again a few months ago to compare to Gnome 42, came back to Gnome again.
I also can't stand having all my programs' name starting with K.
I like Gnome the best too. In my experience, it's the desktop environment that focuses the most on making sure that no little bugs slip in. Like normally when you're using a desktop environment, it will be good except for a few bugs here and there where you have to remember weird things like not backing out of the settings menu in a certain way in order to not trigger a bug. Gnome seems to have the least amount of weird little bugs like that.
It's not very configurable out of the box, but I prefer that too. I'm getting a bit old and set in my ways, and don't really want to mess around with too much configuration anymore.
KDE was the first one I used after getting more comfortable with Linux and leaving Unity behind. KDE was very customizable and extensible, but when you actually started customizing it quickly became unreliable. I stuck with it for a few years then I tried Elementary next and it was pretty polished but it was limited to a specific distribution. After that I went to GNOME and I've been using it for 7 years now. It does need a few extensions, but otherwise I've found that it works quite well. I think I've also changed, I'm not as interested in things like wobbly windows anymore. I just want the desktop environment to stay out of my way, but I also don't want it to be too bare bones.
I’m in the same boat. I use mostly stock gnome to avoid experiencing bugs. I used KDE for a bit and loved it but never really loved how many options the settings gave me. I would also constantly run into issues with the docks disappearing when unplugging monitors. In contrast docks on gnome just work. I really only use the Ubuntu dock extension on gnome
KDE has a lot of customization and plenty of neat features, but it suffers a death of a thousand papercuts. There's just so many small "non-severe" issues that adds up to making it end up feeling clunky and unpolished compared to GNOME's general polish.