I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux.

If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/