You can install Cinnamon on Arch though.

I mean that's just cinnamon with a debian backend instead of the regular ubuntu.

Been using it for two years on my side business laptop, works awesome. Plug and play functionality with most the apps I need, and rock stable.

Why LMDE? Cinnamon is available in the upstream Debian repos...

Is it real that Arch users are rich and have mid level PCs and is always up to date?

I do have a powerful desktop running Arch (or rather EndeavourOS with the EndeavourOS packages slowly removed over time), but also a 15 year old netbook. There's plenty of up-to-date lightweight software in Arch repos, you don't need to limit yourself to old software.

Also it's not like a new version of GIMP is suddenly going to use double the memory if you use the same tools in it.

The biggest issue for the netbook is web browsing, but that's just about web pages being resource hogs nowadays. uBlock Origin and NoScript help massively. Trying to use an old web browser is IMHO a terrible idea - you'll end up with broken pages and a massive pile of security vulnerabilities.

Can you make the taskbar larger in Mint?

My streambox/shizbox machine (a Orange pi 5 MAX w/ 16Gb of ram) has Armbian "bleeding edge"/sway (Which is basically "Rolling release Debian", and no DE) -- everything just werks. It's as easy as "Install packages, copy .dotfiles in, run, done.". With those things said... yes, I am using Debian. And yes, I also has the latest packages -- without breaking things apart. And no, I don't want to go back to x11.

I personally don't see the benefit over regular Mint since it removes snaps anyways. And the newer software from Ubuntu is nice