All of this ricing looks amazing, I am just overwhelmed by the sheer number of everything. Where is it recommended that I start? Right now I have GNOME on Debian 12 (I hate it)
Ricing Gnome is both easier and harder than what you see here.
Gnome is very limiting in terms of customization - compared to other DE / WM atleast.
That means lesser people actually make cool projects / designs for GNOME, that limits your selection.
But then GNOME is actually quite straight forward when you find something. You can just google GTK4 themes and you should find something on https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135
Other than that you might start to browse all the extensions. There are many that will alter your layout, give you additional bar, widgets
A lot of people upload their dotfiles when it comes to WMs. Just look up dotfiles on github or usually github dotfiles are posted on unixporn, here's mine for example: https://github.com/Maniacsan/dotfiles
if you go with a WM like awesome or i3 you're going to edit files. There's a bunch of people who upload their dotfiles on github. Here's a example from me https://github.com/Maniacsan/dotfiles