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> KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop

That’s not my recollection. I believe that the non-free license you mention was the major factor, in addition to the fact that KDE was written in C++ at a time when the free software community still preferred to write software primarily in C.

GNOME was written using a free software toolkit, and it was written in C, and it was associated with the FSF.

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There were several eras of user and developer consternation. I definitely had the impression that the GP describes in the mid to late 2000s.

I distinctly recall people criticizing C++ programs as "bloated" and slow compared to pure C programs.

It depends. KDE3 under Debian was much faster than Fedora Core with Gnome 2.

C++ is definitely a drawback for a long time. Not because it is 'bloated', but because of how ABI changes were handled. It is all history now.

Nowadays the major problem with KDE is that by the time it is stable a new QT major version gets released and along with that it essentially gets a major rewrite, which takes years to stabilize and once it does a new QT version is released, etc etc etc.

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