Mint is the distro I use. I started with it in 2008 after being on some free-only Ubuntu-derived distro for about a year. After that, I went to Fedora, Arch, Manjaro then Fedora, then finally back to Mint recently.

most people don’t even have a desktop these days, so there’s not a lot of financial incentive to design a user experience there.

I don't know if that's true unless you separate desktops from laptops. I think most Americans at least have at least one home PC. https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/percentage-of-households-with-at-least-one-computer/4068/ shows this to be true. As well as https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adults-desktop-laptop-ownership/ and I am sure more stats can be pulled up. I guess if you mean custom-built desktop computers that number is probably low but of things that need to run a 32-bit/64-bit desktop environment computer, there is probably one in every house.