First off, consider that you can make KDE Plasma look and in many cases function like GNOME without needing almost anything outside of a standard KDE Plasma install other than a theme, but it’s essentially impossible to make GNOME look and function like KDE Plasma without making vast, sweeping changes to the GNOME source code.

GNOME is extremely opinionated. If you don’t like the way it does things, then too bad, this is the only way it can do things. Maybe you can install some extensions to make it do things closer to the way you think it should, but good luck when GNOME itself is updated, because those extensions will most likely break because of API changes when that happens.

You yourself kind of highlight this in that you insist on using extensions that add behavior that is just a matter of configuration on almost every other desktop environment (including KDE Plasma).

And the thing is, this is a matter of the developers refusing to acknowledge how most of their users actually use their software. Most people using GNOME are using something like dash to panel or dash to dock, but the developers refuse to add this as native functionality. Same for most other popular extensions, lots of people use them, but the GNOME developers refuse to add them as native functionality.

KDE in general, and Plasma specifically, is not like that. In fact, extensions aren’t even really a thing that most KDE users would even consider, with the notable exception of a handful of things for improving tiling behavior, because in a majority of cases, KDE almost certainly supports doing what you want. In your specific case? The default panel layout is close to what you’re getting out of Dash to Panel, and the overall layout including most of what you get out of the TaskBar extension is five minutes or so of work with the panel editor.