Can you please point out what that means in that sceenshot? Fonts generally got pretty good with fontconfig, but I suppose there are always some edge cases.
It’s very obvious if you look at "Documents" in the first screenshot. The spacing between D, o and c is a lot larger than between t and s.
For the padding, you can see that the spacing is strange under and over the toolbar icons. There is a lot of space between the icon in the title bar and the icon in the toolbar. Alignement between icons and texts in the file browser sidebar seems suspect to me too especially for "Pictures".
I know some people don’t care about that kind of things but I find it unsettling. Looking at it I know I wouldn’t be able to use KDE.