Vnc works for the basic use case of viewing a remote screen. It’s a mess for interactive use, especially with the default implementations you can find on Linux imo. macOS’s built in screen sharing is the only vnc server/client combo that has acceptable latency but even it fails to support basic features like dynamic resolution for different clients.
And I agree that SSH is definitely far more common; I of course use SSH but there are lots of reasons why an interactive desktop is either required, or just far more convenient.
It took me (way too much) effort but I managed to get a pretty stable and smooth RDP server set up on my desktop. Sadly, GNOME3 and RDP don't work well together, so it broke after a random upgrade and hasn't worked since.
You used to be able to use X11 forwarding quite well, but most tools I use tend to render their entire screens as a canvas causing way too many unnecessary updates. Wayland also makes it nearly impossible to do this on a modern system without compatibility layers.
When RDP on Linux works, it works pretty well. I'd love for someone in the GNOME team to find a way to make RDP compatible and easier to set up. There's a VNC setting in the settings somewhere, but VNC is pretty insecure and terrible for interactive work.
X forwarding via compressed SSH (ssh -XC) is likely the simplest bet, especially now that WSL has good support for it, if you need more advanced remote desktop you can take a look at x2go which is based on NoMachine's NX protocol.
