People have been recommending bazzite for newbies who want to game. I haven’t tries it but have found PopOS to be very easy and stable. Pop does simplify nvidia support as well but I run an AMD GPU for the reasons you mentioned.

Even after using PopOS I dont understand the hype. It is Ubuntu-based, meaning that its packages are stale and often quite out of date, which isn’t something I would recommend for a gaming distro.

Better to pick one of the following, which are gaming focused, user friendly, and have up-to-date packages for {Mesa, Vulkan, Wine, Kernel, etc}:

PikaOS Linux

🐦 PikaOS - Your new Linux distro for gaming and beyond! 🚀

PikaOS Linux
Regarding Pop!_OS, (at least historically) it was the easiest distro for Nvidia users. Add to that some neat stuff like a Recovery Partition^[Btw, if you happen to know any other distro that offers something similar, then I’d love to hear about it.] and I can understand where (at least initially) the hype was (IMO justifiably) coming from. Unfortunately, erupting COSMIC DE from the ground hasn’t done Pop!_OS well for upkeeping its good name and reputation. I suppose they’re lucky that Linux users are seriously delayed when it comes to adjusting their recommendations. (Like how a chunk of peeps continued to proselytize for Manjaro till last year or so.)
Recovery Partition

Here is how to use the recovery partition to repair, refresh or reinstall your operating system.

System76 Support