Looks like kirigami2 is one of the handfull remaining KDE components which still uses .qm files. It would be good to mmigrate to .po gettext files.
why?
Answer is very simple. As most of the KDE components already is using gettext it will cause reuse the same shared code from k18n -?> less CPU cache misses -> faster env.
Gentle ping .. any update? Just tested and 5.105.0 still used qm files.
There are no plans to work on this.