> KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it.

I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.

> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.

Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.