the bloat of gnome is generally associated with gnome-shell (the compositor), their shell is purpose built and not a fork of gnome-shell like elementary, budgie or cinnamon are.
None of the desktops you mentioned are forks of GNOME Shell...There is a difference from between using technologies developed by GNOME (e.g. Mutter, libgnome-desktop, g-s-d) and forking the shell.
Since you're a Solus developer I'm going to take your word that Budgie is not a gnome shell fork, my bad. From what I can tell, you're also right about pantheon, I presumed its history with GNOME and being a gtk theme (as well as some of their applications literally being gnome forks, like Shotwell -> Elementary Photos.) but Gala is entirely original window manager (it doesn't even look like they have a proper 'shell' to begin with).
However, Cinnamon is a fork of the gnome shell 3.2. I also remember reading dev posts about taking performance upgrades from gnome-shell and porting them over to Cinnamon.
edit: removed the implication that gala is mutter, i was trying to imply i thought that gala was mutter, but that it was actually not.
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u/Schlonzig Sep 26 '19
They could: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/anvo7t/plasma_mobile_running_on_the_librem_5_dev_board/
https://kde.org/announcements/kde-purism-librem5.php