started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I’ve been using Fedora
Another unpopular opinion:
That’s because you’ve been using distributions that are either behind the times or have a lot of wonky crap added to them that looks like user friendliness when it works and is like fixing windows when it doesn’t (I’ve been through similar path, just with a few other distros along the way)
Start with Gentoo or Arch (maybe Slackware). These are close to the grass, so the way to set things up is the way to fix things up
some apps don’t respect desktop scaling
are these gtk based apps? Different toolsets require different envs