I think I'm missing something... Where is the taskbar? Do you need that "overview" animation each time you want to bring an application to focus? And where are the menus of the focused application?
No, that's not at all what I mean. I prefer no animations and no hidden things at all!
I prefer a taskbar at the bottom with one button per window in it, so that I can have an overview of which windows are open, which document each has, and quickly switch to it with mouse (when not using alt+tab to switch between recent windows).
What I do not want is to have to activate something, or have some animation, first, before seeing what I want to navigate to.
Sorry if it wasn't clear (not a native speaker), I agree completely with all your points. I also don't want hidden things or animations each time I want to focus on another app. It was an open question, I'm wondering if anyone using Gnome 40 can answer? Also, just hovering over the Unity taskbar and scrolling with the mousewheel to cycle between windows is fantastic, I miss that a lot on Windows!
The menus should be in the hamburger menu on the top right of each window. A time waster and a recent fad coming from small screen devices.
I can't answer your other questions. Not only I don't have GNOME 40 but I greatly tweaked Ubuntu 20' GNOME to disable all animations, remove the launcher, move the top bar to the bottom, use those very same horizontal virtual desktops they introduced in 40 (hurrah) and add an old Windows like taskbar. It feels much more productive than the default settings.
I gave a try to KDE for a couple of months in 2014 and didn't like it. I felt I was clicking twice as much as in GNOME to accomplish the same thing. Furthermore I liked the look of GNOME more than KDE's.
I kept using GNOME fallback
(or flashback?) until 2018 because it worked as I like. I knew there were GNOME shell extensions to suit my needs by then so I switched to GNOME shell with Ubuntu 18.04.
I never researched KDE so I don't know what became of it. A total change of DE is a big thing and could take a lot of time.
If you have an app that is hidden under other windows, you have to use the overview or alt+tab to bring it to the front.
However, often we don't need to do that because GNOME encourages us to spread our windows over several workspaces. The animation for switching workspaces is practically instantaneous.
I prefer a taskbar at the bottom with one button per window in it, so that I can have an overview of which windows are open, which document each has, and quickly switch to it with mouse (when not using alt+tab to switch between recent windows).
What I do not want is to have to activate something, or have some animation, first, before seeing what I want to navigate to.