Personally, I like Slackware. For a lot of reasons, many of which I'm fairly certain you (as an old UNIX hack) can get along with.
If you just want to look, you can find a live CD image here https://download.liveslak.org/ ... but as we all know, live CDs have their own problems.
Suggestion: Beg, steal or borrow a spare computer (people throw away 4 year old machines every day, this should not be much of a problem), and install Slackware on it. Run it alongside whatever distro you use today for a month or two. Report back.
Slackware still boots into the CLI by default. I'm sure this won't bother you, but if you have anyone in the household who prefers a GUI, simply edit /etc/inittab, which is mostly self-documenting in Slackware. (Sound familiar?)
vi is a link to Vim's CLI mode ... but if you prefer a more traditional vi, try stevie. (Both come with.)
You can run as root for convenience during this testing phase, but I don't recommend it. adduser does exactly what it did 45 years ago.
If for whatever reason the install doesn't find your network connection, hardwire it and use dhcpcd eth0 before delving too deep. You can change to a wireless connection later if you feel the need.
A simple startx will do just that. KDE is the default, but XFCE is also an option.
The default sound is pulseaudio for historical reasons, but it's fairly easy to switch back to plain-jane ALSA. For normal people, pulse-on-slack works for normal stuff.
Wayland is available for those interested, but by default Slack still uses a more sane x.org.
Obviously, the systemd-cancer is not there, Slackware uses a kind of hybrid of the best bits of the SysV and BSD inits.