So what you are describing is anything but a miminal window manager experience. If you want all the features of a desktop enviorment you will need to use a desktop enviorment. I use sway and I can’t even imagine the config file it would require to have something behave like gnome.
I will say however you can have a user friendly experience on a wm. Rofi now has a wayland version and it can be setup to have power and wifi switches as well as appicons on the launcher.
Not to mention the fact that if you were to use sway it would be completely absent of animation. You’d probably want something like hyprland which has alot of support for animations and looks very nice.
Imho it would be worth it to just learn a wm on a low power device. It’s very rewarding once you get used to it and can be made to look very nice
Edit: You may want to try a pre-configured wm like swayOS