There is some irony in this statement given that GNOME is built on not letting people chose anything and also happens to be the default on Ubuntu, so it's literally force fed down new adopter's throats. It just rubs me the wrong way ideologically so I have to flame them whenever I get the chance.
Ignoring the fact that you can write an extension for gnome to make it do whatever you want? Yes there’s less config out of the box, but there’s literally 1000s of extensions will full access to the shells main process. I’m not saying kde is bad, it has more config out of the box, but it is objectively harder to modify if what you need isn’t covered already. Ubuntu ships gnome with pre installed extensions to turn it into the desktop it wants. That would be a nightmare in kde, would require C++ patches, a language fewer and fewer people are willing to touch.