I wonder how many developers at Red hat or Canonical actually "dogfood" their OSes at stock desktop configuration, instead of immediately going the "pro" route of basically using a custom kernel, disabling autoupdates, using a barebone DE, removing Pulseaudio / Wayland etc.

I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".