You can check my post history but I'm a dev who also play and had no problem with Linux for years. I don't play emulation (which is cool, even have a RPi with arcade joystick) but modern games (Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Ruiner, and some indies) including VR (Half-life: Alyx, Virtual virtual reality, Eye of the template, Cubism, etc) both on desktop and on the SteamDeck. Well it's been few years and I can tell you the tinker to play ratio is easily 99.9% in favor of playing. I don't tinker with drivers or anything of the sort (unless I have to work with CUDA, but still then no problem) but it's true that before buying a game I check ProtonDB to insure it will actually work.
Now in terms of distribution I'm not sure it matters much, what I would though highly recommend is that you make few extra partitions, at least /home this way if you do decide to format (because you somehow broke the OS, want to hop distros, etc) then you will keep you data without having to copy anything on another drive or even slower through the network. It makes changing a breeze.
PS: IMHO as a dev do tinker as much as you need, it's the best way to learn and see which distro is actually the best for you, just backup your data first then you can go "crazy", enjoy it's definitely worth it, even more so as a dev who can at any time say "Oh... that part sucks, I can change it", it's literally liberating.