We also did a lot of intentional action to get the resource usage down in the Plasma 5 generation and timeframe.

E.g. the machine we optimized for during at least one or two Plasma dev meetings I remember was the original Pine64 Pinebook, which was a very under-powered device. We had a stack of them to hand to devs. Intentionally as a "if we can get it to fly there, it'll fly anywhere".

So it's not just that we haven't gotten worse, we also did get legitimately better in later releases compared to some of our porkier ones (which also did exist).

Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.

That's genuinely awesome! You people rock! :-D

Yeah it legitimately trades blows with the lightweight desktops.

Thanks to your work, I have stopped DE switching and am very happy with KDE - may you folks always have this user focus!