I am also in OP's boat and, even though these are great suggestions, personally I would like to be able to do a basic thing such as opening an app with a built-in way rather than having to download yet another app to do that. Every major macos update I have to worry about spotlight reindexing things.

What I find really annoying with macos is that with stock/default settings it is the worst UX. You have to download an app to launch apps, an app to move and resize windows, an app to reverse the mouse's wheel direction to be the opposite of the trackpad, an app to manage the menu bar (esp decrease the spacing, so that you can fit items up until the notch). Then, you also need anyway to spend an hour tweaking settings and run custom commands (such as `defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false` so that you can actually type stuff like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa). These are just needed to make using macos bearable, and do not include any kind of "power user" kind of stuff.

I used to hate macos before getting my own mac, because I had to use some at work in their default settings and it was just a horrible experience.