It seems somewhat contradictory. "many just want a launcher" and "because of Gnome’s size and decades of development, they can also have the ecosystem that DEs like LXDE and Xfce lack" seem contradictory to me. They want just a launcher, but they also want lots of DE specific stuff (presumably widgets and the like).<p>The hostile reception KDE 4 got was more because distros made it the default too early. Activities are an optional feature you need to configure.<p>If the article was correct I would have expected Cinnamon and Trinity to be a lot more popular.
Xfce is by far the most compatible and easiest to customize, not to mention light weight, both to mention also had decades of dev. And of just wanted a launcher they would've been happy with IceWM. People want stability, interoperability and effortless customizability, with good defaults. Esthetics, nice fonts and themes. Ice has those too, but not in a control panel as such, and rarely bundled.