I agree with that take until...

The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;

I guess I'm open minded because I'm a noob with Linux yet I've worked with XFCE, LXQt, KDE, and GNOME (in that order), and none of them were a pain, except possibly LXQt, which was super clunky to customize, but it ran amazing on weak hardware, so I'm giving it a pass. I reckon I'd be cool with Cinnamon, MATE, Unity, or even one of the lightweight DE's.

Yet, all of these DEs I've used were on Ubuntu based distros. I feel afraid to encounter weird things with other distros. For example, doesn't DaVinci Resolve only run on Ubuntu based distros?

Literally the only reason I use Zorin is because I am too computer illiterate to put the stuff i like about its desktop environment in a more lightweight distro or on Qubes

I don't disagree, but it's so much easier to change environment: just logout and login with the new environment.