I always felt the opposite. Gnome is a developed and cohesive experience whereas Plasma lets you configure literally everything with very little guardrails.
That said, I agree with your sentiment for wanting the best of both worlds. I like that Kwin has more features for modern displays (Re: mutter-vrr still in merge review).
A lot of the KDE apps are much nicer than the gtk equivalent (❤️ Kate).
You can mix and match at the cost of disk space though. You could run Gnome Shell and use a few KDE apps. Or run Plasma shell and run all gtk apps.
At least that’s what I do. I use Gnome Shell on my laptop (Gnome has the best laptop experience) and use some KDE apps on it.
On my desktop I use Plasma (the best desktop experience especially for gaming), and use a select few gtk applications.