COSMIC most of the time and then gnome as a fallback when I run into any temporary issues I can’t work around.
I do this with a custom bluebuild image I made that uses ublue (fedora 41) as a base and then added cosmic on top along with some other layers that I need/want.
I use Yazi and its amazing. Here’s their docs on how to set it up as a file picker in helix.
https://yazi-rs.github.io/docs/tips/#helix-with-zellij