One of the unfortunate things I run into on social media is this idiotic perception that KDE is bloated and cumbersome, then when you drill down into the argument, you often find that these same people haven't used it for 10-15 years.
I'm not sure how you can fix branding perceptions that are based on fallacious experiences that weren't updated in the last decade, but I think some manner of user evangelism can also help!
I wouldn't bet that Xfce is that much lighter than Plasma nowadays (but definitively disable features like search indexing on slow hardware). On 2G of RAM, you probably should choose between KDE, LXDE, XFCE, maybe MATE (or lighter environments), the one you like the most. I can't say for Cinnamon ; probably fine. Gnome is probably too heavy.
[1] The Airis Kira Slimpad
I'm using plasma, the default for opensuse leap.
This happens too much with software - look at various open source filesystems that had reliability issues in the early days (which is pretty reasonable), someone writes a piece that highlights this and years later people are still parroting it as current insight - with the downside being that it can crush a project and thus in time make a self fulfilling legacy.