You can use the bangs !arch or !aw to search the arch wiki, e.g. !aw kde.
I don’t think dash to dock is a must have extensiom. The workflow of GNOME is different to other opersting systems. That’s why GNOME boots into overview and not the desktop. The overview is there to launch an app or switch to it graphically. When you boot the system the first thing would be to go into overview to launch an app, hence it boots directly into overview. Removing dash from overview defeats the purpose of it.
But “hot bottom” is important otherwise you have to move the mouse into the upper left corner in order to move the mouse to the bottom to launch an app which is nuts.
I don’t like the philosophy of “if they do it, it’s safe”. But I couldn’t explain it in one sentence either. Not only debian but all big distros have systemd. Not having systemd is such a nieche that you shouldn’t bother with it as a beginner.
Snaps. You don’t provide info why snaps are bad. The snap store is centralized and canonical controls every part of it. Moreover, I’ve never read that snaps are reproducible. Flatpaks are technically reproducible. And we all want and need reproducible builds because then we don’t have to trust but know that it’s the original and published source code.