It seems strange to blame a distribution for a problem you had with a DE. Just change the DE. Or download one of the many Ubuntu flavours which has your preferred DE preinstalled.
Worse, they had a problem with a third-party add-on they installed. An add-on that likely would've been either two orders of magnitude more complex or straight-up impossible on Windows or macOS.
I've had my fair share of OOMs and crashes because of shell customization on Windows and they were all far harder to deal with.
