You can thank Flatpak for that. Dependency hell is real, especially on Debian, which ships old libraries. If you stick to default repos, you're unlikely to directly run into dependency issues, but once you install a program manually or from another repo, it's another story.
One example you may not have noticed, but which is a direct consequence of dependency hell, and a serious security issue, is for Firefox on Debian 11: it took around 6 months after it was EOL for Debian to update Firefox ESR. Twice (in other words, every single Firefox update on Debian 11).
There were similar issues for Chromium.
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Web-Browser-Packages-Debian (same thing happened the year after, at least for Firefox, I don't know about Chromium).
GNOME because the window/workspace management is very good on a single monitor, and the touchpad gestures are nice.