You need to install extensions,

yeah sure, but only if you want to customise the shell in the first place

have community awareness,

regarding what?

and manually configure a bunch of shit,

Thats what one does when they want to customise their desktop anyway, right?

and hope that it works; which it commonly doesn’t.

can't say that my extensions don't.

If the configuration was easy or consistent Linux DEs would be a clear choice for most.

GNOME and KDE are pursuing two different kind of UI philosophies, so of course the configuration isn't consistent on a UI level. And for exactly THAT reason we have the terminal.