I found KDE to be cleaner, they work extremely hard on making GTK apps look like native Qt apps for example. Or how tray Icons (which need a plug in on Gnome) look and behave. On KDE they feel native, Gnomes plugins make them look foreign.
So weirdly enough KDE is imho the cleaner of the two.
Not a hardware store but a few weeks ago I was at Decathlon and one worker there was walking in circles carrying a single piece of clothing, pretending to be super busy. When I eventually asked them if they have a moment they still had the same piece in their hand. Maybe I am rude but for like 10-15 minutes I couldn’t figure out what they were doing.