Like others have mentioned, I am in the same boat of having multiple communities to follow with the same name but on different instances and I forget about others or (more likely) don't even know that others exist.
It does bug me that I can't group communities that exist on different instances together. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to a collection of communities that I can give a label to.
A way to group all patientgamers communities together would be a huge help.
It's just the way the whole federation stuff works I guess. And I like it...Except for when I don't 😂
Personally I stopped custom roms a while back. I'm not hardcore in the anti-google camp though.
If you are, obviously custom roms will be all you should be looking at. Tons of good recommendations in this thread already.
If you're not in this camp though, the default pixel experience has been great for me and might be for you. I find it the least annoying of the oem experiences (not cluttered in features I'll never use, simplified settings menu where I've never had to use the search on since it all made sense etc).
I'd say use the stock rom for a few weeks. If you hate it, custom roms are always there for you.