GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.

Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It’s personal preference in the end of course.

This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It’s been yearsnow… Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it’s at.