These days, I daily drive Niri and love it. I love the workflow of a scrolling WM. I love that I can configure it via a single text file in the standard configuration directory, I love how lightweight it is. It’s just about perfect for me.
It may have, yes!
One of the ways we run the KDE community is that we have an annual process to elect community-wide goals, which then have their own leadership team, infra, budget, etc. The goals themselves are long-running, i.e. it's not one year and done, either.
In about 2020/21 one of the goals that won/was added was titled "Improve Consistency across the Board", which lead to e.g. a comprehensive update of the HIG, renewed efforts on the controls library, and many cleanup passes across the products to get them up to date and in line.
It's an ongoing process and I'm sure plenty of people can still point to a pet peeve or an ugly corner - we're happy to have discerning users with high expectations - but the general state of things should be much better than half a decade ago.
There's also a next-gen styling/theming system project called Union in the works along with a next-gen design system developed in collaboration to take things to the next level in a few years, but we're taking our time to get it really right instead of pulling a Liquid Glass (one lesson we've learned through the years is that clawing your way back from reputational damage is really hard, and compromising on release quality is never the way to go). You can see annual updates on this e.g. in the feeds from our flagship dev conference.