I have used the same Gentoo/i3wm setup for ... a lot of years. Probably 10 or more by now. I guess we maybe changed the way package-installer (portage) profile

I have used the same Gentoo/i3wm setup for ... a lot of years. Probably 10 or more by now. I guess we maybe changed the way package-installer (portage) profiles worked during that time, and I sort of recall something about how repos are configured being changed. Those were each at most a command or two run as root. Otherwise, I don't really get a sense that I have had to do any tinkering other than what I specifically want to mess around with something, as you say. E.g., I changed from grub to efi-stub booting, which was fun and took a bit of work. I tried out Conky and some different status bars (cool, but not really my thing). Now, i3 is really pretty barebones. I can imagine that some desktop environments maybe require more tinkering than i3, but if so then that's not really Linux's fault, is it.