To be honest, I've seen commercial 7' racks in data centres and computer rooms that were worse than the worst ones here!
I was once tasked with rejigging 3 racks in a remote computer room. The racks were arranged in an "L" pattern due to the constraints of the room. None of the doors - front or back - could close because of cables running between servers and switches. Some cables actually ran diagonally across the L shape. A lot of cables were jammed between the mounting rails, and 3 metre cables were used where a 50cm one would have done, or 2 metre ones where a 3 meter or more was needed. Almost nothing was labelled, and where it was, it was wrong. The cable colour coding scheme was ignored, and nothing was recorded. There were servers racked on a slant - TWO nuts off on one side - and even mounted back-to-front. Others were literally sat directly on top of other kit, not bolted in at all. RAID arrays for critical servers were mounted in adjacent racks, with the cables running around the opened rear rack door, and there were a number of suspicious, unmarked servers, of odd brands that were hooked into the main switch, that nobody could identify. One turned out to be an abandoned Nagios server, but one was never identified, and nothing broke, nobody screamed when I turned it off.
Just about all the horrible things you have seen or heard about were in that room. It took weeks to sort it out.
I guess I'm the heretic here - I'm currently using Cinnamon DE, after recently switching from MATE, which I've used almost exclusively for about 13 years. I always preferred Gnome (even v1) to KDE, but used both in the early 2000's, but eventually settled on Gnome2 by about 2005, because it was what Ubuntu used, and that was the distro I was using back then. Later, when all the main Linux distros switched to Gnome3, about 2013, it wrecked my workflow - it simply wasn't possible to do the things I needed to do - though I tried for a couple of months. Mainly things like lack of usable support for multiple monitors, full-screen-first app behaviour, rearranged key-bindings, etc. just made it impossible to work efficiently. I tried most of the commonly supported DEs - LXDE, XFCE, LXQT, plain X-Window(!) and even an early version of Cinnamon, but eventually settled on MATE when it became supported by Debian. I felt at home with it, and stuck with it for the longest of any of them - mainly because it fits my workflow, even through its evolution through different work roles and personal projects. I wasn't really looking for a new DE, but last year, I refurbished a load of old laptops to give away on Freecycle/Freegle, initially putting Debian + MATE on the early ones. I saw a discussion about Linux Mint, and how it had matured into a really beginner-friendly system, and decided to try it out. I'm by no means scared of doing the technical work to get things running (I was doing tarball installs back in the mid 1990s) but I do appreciate convenience, and Mint was amazingly smooth.
I'd installed Ubuntu for my kids and friends over the years, and still hated the way Gnome3 works, even though it has evolved and some of my original gripes were now alleviated, so as Mint is based on Ubuntu, I was not expecting much. I was totally shocked - it was basically easier than Windoze 10 (which I was adminning for my day job) - printers and scanners, something that have long been annoying to support - worked instantly, and the Cinnamon DE was a revelation - smooth and friendly, and works well with how I like to use a DE. It runs well on old hardware - though 4GB seems to be the hard, workable minimum, and people seem to really like it.