Well put. The one thing I would add is using the Nix package manager on a distro other than NixOS! I’m daily driving Fedora 39 + Nix (home-manager) with zero problems. My pick would either be Fedora or Debian.
Tons of good documentation either way. Flatpak the packages you, no kidding, need to be easy / consistent to debug. Non-root podman for containers. Nix for more up to date packages than are available in the native repos (especially useful with Debian) + the other benefits like nix-shell.