I would just personally stick with Fedora. I know why people recommend Mint because it's easy to help people transition from Windows, but it's based on either Ubuntu or Debian which holds packages updates back for far longer for 'stability'. But if your main purpose is gaming or general desktop use or really anything that doesn't involve critical infrastructure that should go offline as minimally as possible like a server, this stability doesn't realistically help much and can actually be detrimental. For example, there have multiple optimizations in the kernel this year that have done things like improve overall performance using AMD processors by 2- 3% or lowered necessary power consumption by eliminating unnecessary processes. These updates are more rapid and effective if you use current gen hardware that has not yet been fully developed around, like a current gen GPU/CPU. Like you said, you're only really losing out on these optimizations by sticking with something that holds back packages that far. Fedora doesn't release immediately with minimal testing like Arch, so there's not usually much to worry about outside of big version updates (Fedora 48 - > 49, or KDE 5 - > 6), which I would typically wait a few weeks to upgrade to.

If you want to mainly test different desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc, then I would really recommend using an atomic version of Fedora, or even better something like Bazzite/Aurora/Bluefin. Atomic refers to them only ever updating fully or not at all, so there's less chance of breakage due to a system shutdown or package conflicts. It's like flashing your phone with a stock image from Google, Samsung, or whoever and it comes with whatever apps, drivers, etc that are pre-set or chosen by you. The cool thing about it is that you can "re-base" to another version without touching your user files by entering a command and restarting your computer. There's programs like Mending Wall that help maintain any system files that may be affected by this, typically only necessary if changing between Gnome and KDE that store things in the same place. This means you can quickly switch to any other atomic variant when you feel like trying out something new without needing to reinstall your OS or try to make two conflicting desktop environments work together. Since your user files aren't touched, you can just boot Steam up in either one and your games will still be there.