I keep going into Google slides and being annoyed I can’t just use G R and S to manipulate objects

Edit: And I love how in Blender, ctrl-z will undo/redo selection. I hate spending so much time selecting things just to misclick in other programs.

Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there's probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender's features.

Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set -- because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob's your uncle.

Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can't be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it's also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn't exactly awkward). There's also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.

All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can't possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can't pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it's professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn't "intuitive" (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender's defaults aren't bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that's not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you'll get fifteen answers.

Gimp's problem is not so much the UI, but that it has fallen way behind Photoshop in terms of features. Fixing up the UI wouldn't hurt, but you'd still be stuck with a graphics app that's 20 years behind the competition. It would need a heck of a lot more work to catch up.

You're thinking of Glimpse o believe. And yes gimp really needs a change. Krita isn't bad but not good for more graphic design oriented tasks. It's type tools are awful.