It deserves all the criticism.
And it is by far my favorite DE.
As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
It’s because we wasted so much time on the Gnome side of the fence, cracking jokes at KDE, and now we know what we were missing and we want our wasted time back.