I share this feeling, and I've found some relief by reducing the complexity of my configuration by an order of magnitude.

I only do computing on 3 platforms: A text-mode Lisp VM (Emacs), the Web (Firefox) and Unix (Xterm).

My Linux configuration is really simple. No desktop enviroment. Just a simple manual tiling window manager. StumpWM is my favorite option, but ExWM or dwm also work fine.

I could use macOS or Windows, but with Linux I can simplify furhter. In some distributions, there's a minimal layer between me and upstream. Just creating binaries and dealing with dependencies. An easy litmus test for a good distribution is to set up the above configuration and check what is running with e.g. htop. Is it clean, with nothing added by me?

I have learned not to change defaults till I understand why they are there. That's an intance of Chesterton's fence, a very useful heuristic. Owing to this, I have very few dotfiles, which are ~100 LOC. They are completely trivial. I almost know them by heart.

NixOS and GuixSD are an interesting alternative. They make simple things very simple. You can set up your whole machine in a declarative manner with a few LOC placed in a single file. Nothing breaks, it's functional. You can rollback anytime. However, some complicated things require a lot more work than with a normal setup, others less.