But isn’t Kodi an straight up media player instead of full blown Desktop Environment?

You still need an DE/WM installed on the system to run Kodi, you cannot just run Kodi by its own thing directly

This comment now makes me wonder why there’s isn’t an kind of Desktop Environment that specifically made for TV and game console, with the UI design that is easy to use with remote/controller and touchscreen

BlackBox for Linux, the UI is very clean and fit so well with the rest of Gnome apps

There is actually a way to run Debian on Lego Mindstorms toy robot kit using ev3dev

Tho I never owned one of these kit, it still pretty cool looking