What you want should be quite easy to achieve with i3/sway or awesomewm. i3 has a slew of possibilities for "bars", even the xfce/kde panels: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/i3#i3bar_alternatives
Awesomewm is totally usable via the mouse and infinetly extendaple via lua.
Since tiling is not wanted, I think gnome + extensions should be the way to go.