Have you tried changing what the applets do when you click? Most of the time you can set whether it should create a new instance, cycle windows or raise or lower existing ones from the applet settings. See if changing that could help?

I use XFCE/Budgie (flick between the two) so not too familiar with cinnamon.

If you’re frequently distro-hopping, I recommend using a seperate /home partition. I did that before I settled down, I can’t begin to describe how convenient it was (especially if you use Flatpak).