I agree on KDE being better but that's just because they consistently put in the effort and results piled up over time.
Sure, with a few setbacks (cue 4.0 nightmares) but overall their technological choices (Qt in primis), architecture and quality of contributors won the battle.
Gnome used to be way more polished at the Gnome 2 vs KDE 3 era but kind of lost its way over time.
It's definitely not about unchangeable defaults vs configuration (there's a market for both).
People love Apple because it makes very high quality hardware, and its software is generally very reliable. They don't really like that you can't configure things. They just put up with it.
There's a whole industry of little apps that let you fix things about MacOS that doesn't really exist on Windows. Rectangle, Karabiner Elements, SteerMouse, SteerMouse, etc.
I didn't say it can't succeed. Just that KDE is a better (and more powerful) desktop. Gnome obviously suits some people The problem is the people whom it doesn't suit, they can't change anything. They are beholden to the choices made by Gnome's developer team. That will never suit everyone. Of course extensions are a thing but they tend to cause conflicts between them and not be updated to work with newer Gnome versions quickly enough.
I moved away from Apple too for this reason in fact.
Because Preview works, KPDF works and Gview behaved weird or in the wrong way most of the time
Apple builds the automatic car by removing the gear shift, Gnome builds it by removing the gas pedal and just having a button called "Go" which makes you go at 10mph
Not my experience. I have a Gnome desktop that maybe a Gnome developer have a hard time to recognize as such. It works as I want and I keep the convenience of being able to Google problems and solutions of a mainstream desktop (KDE being the other one) and not a more or less obscure one.
This means that under the hood, using extensions, you can customize that Gnome car. Can an Apple automatic car do that as easily?
It's good that you can do this, but most people prefer the default experience instead of fiddling with customizations to make it more special. And yes, fiddling and customizing is cool, when you have time.
So between the Apple automatic and Gnome "pick customizations" I know which one I prefer (and yes Apple does have extensions, settings, etc). Yes, there won't be a perfect solution and sometimes you kinda miss some minor thing but it is minor.
For example, looking at: https://extensions.gnome.org/#page=2 there's Date and Time formatter (you can do that in Apple) and "Sound Input & Output Device Chooser" which you can do by going in settings in Apple - but it doesn't matter most of the time because the out of box experience works almost perfectly
Extensions aren't great though. I tried using Gnome that way for a while but some extensions cause conflicts between one another and in many cases they are not updated in a timely manner when a new gnome version comes out.
In contrast, KDE also supports extensions but I've never needed any because it's so configurable.