For me Gnome and its GDK4 widgets feels like waisting space. Also many window title bars, button sizes and margins are way to big for me.

You seem to be aware of many things.

Just for communication you are using more unfree tools then free and more then in the other categories.

A question with no right answer, because it is a matter of taste and habits.

Both are very much sophisticated desktop environments which very useful defaults. Neither Gnome nor Plasma are too complicated for beginners and can be customized easily. If you want to you can go very deep into the customization too.

What I find kind of strange is that they have used Gmail before. Feels not to be the best decision for a VPN service which offers anonymous access.

Even better that they have switched now.

A combination of different.

For brainstorming Logseq is great, for tasks I use CalDAV in combination with Thunderbird and JTX Board (Android) a lot.

Briar has that.

What if you are using VIM and Arch …

That after getting used to Linux I will hate to be forced to use less free operating systems.

That girls wear pink and boys wear blue.