My computer isn't a Raspberry Pi or a creaky Thinkpad from 2007 that I hang on to as some sort of streetcred hacker Shibboleth so Gnome's resource utilization is irrelevant to me.
What isn't irrelevant is stability.
Ubuntu LTS is as close to a de-facto standard as you can get in the Linux world and it is supported by most, if not all, third parties when it comes to installing things like Tensorflow and CUDA.
With other distros you have to hold your nose and dive into personal blogs (where my Fedora if-not-true-then-false readers at?) and add third party repos hosted in Malwaristan to get things done.
You don't have to run pacstrap to install i3, apt can do that. I also have $20 in my storage budget so I don't care about saving 376kB by running a "lean" install.
GNU+Debian
TAILS
OpenBSD
It's a shame that so many people are mentioning their desktop environments, as if if you were to take this away and leave them with their distro at the command line they may switch or choose something that better fits their use case. My two cents. i3 and NoX user here.