You should try labwc, it’s like fluxbox/blackbox but for wayland. (Or just use fluxbox or blackbox)

Blocking you too

It was gnome-shell extensions pulling in gnome desktop which kinda makes sense.

You don’t have to change distro to do this BTW just install a desktop environment that uses X11 instead of Wayland and try that. If it doesn’t fix it you can uninstall it.

What country is this if you are safe to say? I haven’t heard of anything like that before

Install wine-staging through your package manager.

Install these extra programs if you need the things that they do.