Distro is more an alignment of philosophy between you and the distro. Something slowly updated but really stable? Debian. Something cutting edge, but with lots of guides? Arch, etc. etc.

Any of them can pretty much run any shell, DE or WM, and as that's what you spend the most of the time interacting with, that's a more personal touch point. The distro is really just the package manager that you regularly interact with, and thats easy enough to hide behind something like topgrade.

I have only used Sway for a few years and anything else feels bloated and slow to use to me now. I spent a long time tweaking to get it how I wanted both in terms of add ons and config, then setting the keyboard shortcuts that work for me. I even have a bunch of them configured on my actual keyboard on layers to make them even easier to activate.

Its worth the investment for me as its now transparent to my workflow. I run the same config across all my machines and its been a stable config for the longest time. Long term stability is the key for me.