All well and good, but realistically any backdoor can be exploited by unfriendly as well as friendly actors.

Also does this mean government agency communication would also be unencrypted or just Joe schmoe?

The only superior Linux distro and DE is the one that works for you and meets your needs.

This is different for each user and, frankly, the joy of Linux that it has such a variety as to be able to meet almost everyone’s needs.

For me , personally, thats Debian/Gnome with minimal tweaks but just because it works for my workflow does not make it superior.