As a rule you can. You may have found an exception on one small point. Those are almost inescapable. That may have been more of a window manager issue than the desktop presentation. Which used to be more flexible. You could run different WM in the past with whatever presentation layer on top. Unfortunately today mutter is tightly tied to GNOME as kwin is to KDE.

But it isn't a fight or a war. Use what works for you. Whether it's LXQT, XFCE, KDE, GNOME, Hyperland, i3, Deepin. They're all great.

Quick edit to mention that Simplicity can also be a feature. I fought with GNOME a lot to get it to work how I wanted. But it was always the extensions that broke. The underlying layers were always simple and solid. For me KDE overall works better. But I'm not going to deny it can be very trying sometimes loading a custom theme and something brakes. For my current pet peeve certain distributions enabling the global desktop menu by default. And Katie has no clear succinct way of finding and disabling that without editing a config file. It's certainly not for everyone and something like hyperland even fewer people. Even if it looks sick as hell. The progress on Cosmic looks great so far too.