I tried Kdenlive, OpenShot, Shotcut, Pitivi and others. It's a personal thing but I just could not get used to their UIs. Well except for Pitivi, but that one is way too buggy.

I even briefly considered using ffmpeg and bash to get the edits I wanted...

Blender has a complicated UI but at least it feels completely consistent and thought-through. And also like it wasn't designed 20 years ago. I just have more confidence using Blender than others because it's so big, respected and known.

My learning process is basically "How do I do this thing I did in Premiere?" and basic Googling/YouTubing. I needed a tutorial video to get started but otherwise if you know NLEs it shouldn't be too hard.

Try kdenlive for basic video editing. It's better than openshot