My preferences aren't religious-strong, but I have enough of a preference that I installed KDE Plasma on Pop! OS instead of the Gnome-base default. And I've struggled to get the network manager working in KDE which has been a nuisance and never a problem on distros who ship KDE as the default - so there's at least some importance in a distro's default, even if others are available. I've been known to pull up a Gnome version of some application in KDE and vice-versa because of individual preferences. But as a desktop / window manager yeah I actually have a strong preference.

The article actually isn't loading for me, so I'm not sure if these are the same design philosophies addressed, but some of the key things are:

* I find Gnome's dock-like things very annoying. I find it easier to get KDE's task bar to take up a very small number of pixels and I feel it stays out of my way more while I'm focusing on other applications. It feels like Gnome takes after Mac and KDE takes after Windows, and I just prefer the latter, UI-wise.

* KDE is far more configurable for keyboard shortcuts. I use the ability to pin a window to the left / right half, or one of the quadrants using they key-binding of my choice all the time. I hadn't been using KDE for very long when I would miss that every time I was on another machine. Even after being back on Gnome for a couple of years I wanted it. There are some third-party add-ons that do it, but they were buggy for me. I'd rather just have KDE out-of-the-box. This is one example, but keyboard shortcuts in general are for more widely used and configurable on KDE.

edit: Clarified a few things, but also have now read the article: yes I like this "completist" philosophy, especially since much of the complexity is hidden away in drop-down menus. I think it's the best of both worlds.