I remember the first time I heard about XFCE, it was back in my exclusive Slackware days around 2001'ish. It was based on GTK+ 1.2, which had fugly dialogs and stuff but I loved light weight GTK+ apps, so I was excited for it. It compiled easily and was great, right out of the box. XFCE was more like CDE back then (and I still use similar panel and launcher configuration to this day). XFCE 3 back then had a default sound scheme that made a bunch of various reverberating boingy sounds when you clicked things... I couldn't bring myself to disable it, it was so funny.
I'm still using XFCE 4.18 though, divorced from Arch packaging and Gentoo ebuilds with only the parts of it I want. I don't want the new one. It took me many years to get off 4.12. For my main UI, I don't want change (and breakage of my beautiful style because they have removed things).