Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
Install Slackware and purchase random card from aliexpress, and you might just have to.
And once you do that, remember to de-blob your kernel (and re-write every piece of non-free software, although I suppose Slackware doesn’t tolerate proprietary software much) and statically link it to exactly the binaries you need.
Comes close to customisation but leaves out the pain of having to write drivers.