Apologies, not sure what you mean by notifications. Do you mean email notifications of unread Teams messages? I get a few of those and just ignore them. When I look at the Teams apps, it's very clear what I need to respond to.

Notifications on my laptop or phone about DMs or @‘s. There are certain people or channels that I want to get notifications from. Since I can’t trust the notifications I end up having to leave Teams open and check it constantly. This is distracting to me.

Most messages don’t have an expectation of a timely response. But of those that do, I need to be able to rely on notifications.

slack notifications are beyond broken as well, so no competition there

So I'm not the only one. At least once a week for 4 years I have tried fiddling with my notification settings in several different slack projects because they're not functioning how they're supposed to (not how I have set them up).

I just gave up eventually.

Could you provide examples regarding how they've failed?

Have you spoken with Slack directly about this? I've brought up several issues to their "Feedback" area and usually have very quick responses for a company that services as many people as Slack does.

Discord's notifications are on-point, so competition _there_.

Of course Discord has the image problem of being marketed to gamers (and that's fine, because it lets them focus their efforts), but as a tool it is pretty well crafted.