At that point why not just run a rolling release? Debians whole selling point is stability which backports kinda ruins.

You can change to generic button glyphs in the controller settings I believe

Ahh I may have misunderstood sounds like you’re trying to “pin” applications to be launched. This is more app launcher than dock.

Wonder if rofi would suit your needs?

https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

This is the main benefit. However, i’m finding the software I use requires less dependencies and libraries these days.

I barely even use flatpaks anymore. Almost everything is in official repos. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a dependency conflict.