I use zsh most of the time combined with prezto because I like prezto's defaults. It's very much boated though.
I have looked for alternatives to the shitty shell experience and I found this: https://ambrevar.xyz/lisp-repl-shell/ but I haven't gotten to it try it yet. The problem is that I'm productive in my prezto environment and I'm not sure if its worth it to learn something new, even though the lisp environment is a click away...
I had this same experience with StumpWM. I don't have the time anymore to fuck around with my DE, which is a Gentoo system that takes up plenty of time as it is to maintain that shit. Every month some news item on deprecated software besides the 1600 packages is plenty for me atm.