As someone who loves the old designs (I've run Chicago95 for years now), the only thing stopping me from running CDE is it lacks first-class support from any distro I've used
Anyway, Debian had a reputation of being really difficult to install in the late 2000's. I probably got lucky with it. I started using it in 2011 (first time using linux and a computer illiterate just as today) and i went through it just the MS way, like "whatever, continue, continue".
I would uninstall the screensaver so fast if I saw a nag screen. Wtf it's a screensaver, what does it matter? I'll use a version that's 50 years old if I want to.
Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.
They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying "this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year". Debian didn't want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.
The "install lib-blah-blah-blah" bit doesn't bother me 'cause whenever I need to make something work, I just copy and paste the "sudo apt install ..." commands straight from the internet :)