They can be maintainers if they can document that they are volunteers and do not work for any state sponsored entity. I don't know haw easy that will be in practice.
It's actually working mostly fine me now with KDE 6.2.1, kernel 6.11.3, and nvidia 5.60.something. I get janky scrolling in firefox but apart from that it's been fine.
KDE Plasma because it's the one I like. If it disappeared tomorrow, I'd use Xfce.