I found every single time that it just wasn't worth it. There was always some critical failure that was either completely underlooked or a 20 year old bug/shortcoming that had every patch to fix it rejected. I genuinely don't understand how people tolerate the dogshit being forcefed to you on all of these controlled platforms. People say that everything is getting worse, and it's true, but it's also true that you're actively choosing to use the things that are getting worse.
I've eventually settled on NixOS and XFCE so I can tweak things to my particular needs while also benefiting from an army of unpaid labor continually improving nixpkgs and other flakes. This setup isn't perfect, but I've optimized for maximal comfort & utility while exerting minimal effort & time. Things really only break when they're self-updating under the hood, which thankfully is rather rare in nixpkgs.
Everybody has different needs and something you don't care about on Windows or Mac or Gnome might be critically important for someone else.
> a horrible mishmash of apps and programs and nothing integrates really well long term (story of life on a Linux desktop, really)
I used to use Macs at work and while I never really loved the experience (and certainly not that of fiddling with kernel drivers) and write keenly felt the metaphorical guards watching from the towers, it really did feel like a thought-through experience for a normal computer user.