I probably would have gone with Xfce since this is mostly acting as a server but this was also my first real experiment to see if I could replace a Windows desktop with Linux so I wanted some more functionality in that regard.
Sure, expending hours learning shortcuts is way more minimalist than using plasma. Plasma used to be bloated, but now is very similar to XFCE in terms of resources, and if you don’t use akonady or baloo even more minimal.
Until now the easiest experience for me I actually had was Arch. You have to do everything yourself but i found it way easier to fix things in Arch than in any other distro I used.
Somewhere I read that it didn’t have an installer which turned me off for a while, and then I realized that you just need to “archinstall” from the live ISO and I was off and running in minutes.