Is it? Gnome loads in a ton of services and feels pretty bloated to me. I don't notice that it's any lighter than KDE, and it often feels more sluggish.

But, they're both desktops and are loading in a bunch of stuff whether you use it or not, so you're right that they're pretty comparable.

Plasma itself isn't bloated, it is only bloated if you install the entire suite of KDE applications. Installing plasma by itself doesn't require that many dependencies.

GNOME has a similar level of optionals for their desktop environment as well, you're just expected to actually INSTALL them.

KDE uses less RAM, you can fact check quite easily.

Depending on the distro it ships with more or less stuff, but a few games, an office suite, media players for audio/video and in some cases a partition manager, are all necessary tools in any setup, at least in my book.

I don't see the bloat.