Longtime Mint stickler here, never developed a taste for any other distro schools (Arch, Fedora, other *buntus and Debians). But tried out MX after a long period of deferring and I am genuinely blown away. This distro has everything I could have ever ask for - Debian stability coupled with advanced hardware support (with more recent zen kernels and drivers), a solid opinionated Plasma DE setup that is both minimalist and all-encompassing at the same time, and a full stock of sensible and pragmatic utilities to cover the boring stuff.
Mint's relative lethargy at migrating to wayland has been increasingly becoming a sore point due to the sheer practical difference it makes (especially in terms of multi-monitor HiDPI and fractional scaling, in addition to security and performance). MX KDE has all that covered and then some. It's the first time I had to genuinely stretch to find any fault. The only complaint I have is that they aren't letting me post this testimonial in the MX forum because it doesn't accept anon-aliased emails for logins.
I already edited my comment to say "one of the first" 3 hours ago.
Also yes, I consider every linux DE that isn't Gnome or KDE "smaller".
I assume edit changes take a while before they are updated on all other instances. I had similar "issues" in the past too. It's pretty annoying. When I replied it didn't show the edited version.