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Did you try the arc-dark theme? It's quite popular among archlinux users, and I think it looks pretty polished. [1]
I'm no design expert, so I got nothing to say in terms of UI/UX. But it's the theme I've grown most comfortable with to use over the years. I agree with your sentiment that most themes lack attention to detail, where everything looks just more cluttered than anything else (especially when taking a look at icons, fonts etc).
[1] https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme
I really like the Chicago95 theme here, it's great with XFCE/xubuntu on low spec devices.
I also like setting up a different use to login with the OpenBox WM and a bunch of retro unix backgrounds--it kind of has the feel of CDE and old Solaris systems. I haven't used it but apparently someone is working on a more modern retro feel CDE-inspired thing here: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
It's not canon to the Windows 95, but XScreenSaver pairs nicely to go with the retro feel: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ These screensavers are exactly the kind of thing workstations of the era would have been blasting in computer labs nearly 24/7.
IMHO retro modern computing environments are quirky fun that should be a bigger thing. :)
I actually didn't like (and still don't) Windows in any form, but the one thing I did/do like is the Windows 95/98/2000 UI. I came from an Amiga background, and even though I think of Amiga with fond memories, I thought the UI was a bit too spartan and clumsy (MUI was a step in the right direction though).
Nowadays I use Memphis-98 [0] as GUI theme (not desktop and window decorations). It's is kinda like Chicago95, but feels a bit more modern, not just a straight copy of Windows. There are some layout bugs, and some apps looks overall bad, like Firefox, Thunderbird and BDeaver. I had to manually turn off theming of DBeaver because it's basically useless with the Memphis theme.
For Qt I use the built in Windows look.
[0] https://gitlab.com/hadrosoft/memphis-98
.. this is an easter egg in the bootmenu of our distro, c.f. https://github.com/fsfw-dresden/usb-live-linux/tree/master/f...
After booting into 'windows mode' and a delay, youtube(MaU5ED3LyXM) is being autoplayed fullscreen. There's also a qemu icon on the desktop that loads a random 50MiB win95 image I found on archive.org