Several reboots later, I'm running plasma on Fedora 40, with gnome bits removed. Everything is really weird, but the system needs only two gigs of memory after booting to the desktop. That is nice!
@zygoon That’s about the same as Gnome when Gnome Software isn’t running. That consistently uses 300-800MB.
@that_leaflet @zygoon sounds a bit high to me. With a couple of plasmoids and some extra services running I'm at 1.6 after a reboot. Regardless, I think KDE has been less memore hungry than Gnome for a while now.