The amount of desktop customizations someone does is inversely correlated to 3 factors:

1. How much free time someone has.
2. How many ducks they give.
3. How un-aligned a chosen distro is with ones tastes.

My advice: pick a distro where their defaults are to your taste. Mint for me is it. i think there are only about 4 settings i tweak before I'm delighted with a fresh Mint box. I wish some other distros would take notes.

I didn't change much (NixOS, Gnome, Wayland):
- Use tokyo-city-dark theme globally (stylix).
- Prefer dark colour scheme (gdm).
- Hide gnome top-bar when a window touches it / overlaps (gnome extension).
- Add key binding (ctrl+alt+t) to launch kgx terminal (gnome setting).

I configure my system from a flake as well which is versioned on GitHub, so initial setup, including installed packages, bash aliases, etc, can all be restored easily in case my SSD craps out or something.