You're not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said "Where do you want to go today?" with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said "tomorrow" instead of "today". Etc.

KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.

Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it's own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.