Everyone else has answered your other questions, but let me just say that I've used KDE Neon (while distro hopping) it's both beautiful and functional. The latest KDE developments are really solid and intuitive, and based on their development updates I've seen on Mastodon and elsewhere, it seems like they're really starting to understand their userbase.

I.E. they understand that most people want to double click icons to launch them even though almost the entire development team prefers single click. They're not doing the tunnel-vision dev thing where they force what they love on users even though the vast majority of the userbase prefers the opposite.

Edit: It looks and feels gorgeous, and even similar alternatives like Kubuntu kind of feel a little worse to me. Then again, I'm a serious Cinnamon / KDE fan, so other peoples' mileage may vary.