Depends on what you mean by a DE’s “look”, if you just mean the theme and layout then you can theme something like xfce or lxqt to look similarly modern.
I’ve not tried it, but you could try cosmic? Or switch to a tiling WM or a scroller like Niri which would be even lighter (with the caveat that it’s lighter because it does less stuff for you by default).
I think they just meant precedent, like it sets an example of how they treat copyright infringement.