if you run into any weird edge case issues it’s much more likely that someone else has already been there and discovered solutions

While that is true, the amount of those weird edge cases that you’ll get varies wildly between distros. In my experience so far on a somewhat comparable rig to OP, Bazzite has been the only one that actually just worked out of the box and had not a single hickup, while any other distro I’ve tried (Pop, Fedora and Arch) all had several issues that required troubleshooting.

So, I guess, for someone willing to actually understand Linux, learn, and troubleshoot issues themselves, your advice is the way to go, but for the relative who wants their system to just work and would call me anyway at any sign of trouble, I’m recommending Bazzite (or Aurora, I guess) all the way