That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
From a purely technical perspective perhaps, but overall I don't think so. KDE3 was hugely popular and regularly depolyed. Based on my personal observations (admittedly EU based), it was the single most popular *nix desktop at the time. KDE4 more or less killed that over night and as far as I can tell KDE has never recovered neither marketshare nor the mindshare it had.
On a personal note I went from a huge KDE fan, and someone who deployed and managed KDE3 workstations at a small company, to literally not using it for over a decade.
the perception lasted longer than the reality
Which is the one really important lesson in all of this.
Strawberry Player (the fork of Clementine which is the fork of Amarok 1.4) is still going and it is ported to Qt 6 so it works okay with many highdpi environments