Systemd, Wayland and Gnome seem to be a concerted effort from Red Hat. I won't use them; once there are no more Linux distros that let me avoid them, I'll be off to BSD-land. I'm not a hostage!
Fortunately I've managed to excise this mess of interconnected dependencies from my computer and run plain X11 with a very functional desktop environment.
No PulseAudio, Systemd, NetworkManager, PipeWire or even D-Bus. And a very low memory footprint and the system is extremely fast, despite it being old hardware.
All of this bloatware is coming out of Freedesktop.org, which is run by Red Hat / GNOME. And it's where most of the toxicity in open source is coming from.
I've also gotten rid of the "modern" user-interface design trends as well. I get a high contrast, high information density desktop with full colour icons. None of this depressing grey garbage we get nowadays. All of the keyboard shortcuts work - I don't even need to use the mouse.
If you showed someone from 20 years ago what a "modern" desktop interface looked like, they would be outraged and in disbelief. We have taken an enormous step back for some reason.
I used Slack for many, many years both as a personal OS and a production server. It's rock solid, fast, and lean. It's not easy though, and you're going to be doing a lot of compiling from source and package management by hand. These are the trade-offs.
Linux is and has been courting the casual user for quite a while now, which is why I think things are going in this direction. It's a testament to its modularity that it can support the Windows shipjumpers as well as your use cases.