I know this: I use and love Debian stable on my desktop, but I'm not a gamer. I put it on my 11 year old son's PC and all his games ran like shit until we switched to Pop OS instead, so there ya go, there's an anecdote I guess.
And yes we used the correct accelerated drivers, tried different versions of proton, tried them under wine, etc. Pop OS was just better for that situation.
Gaming vs Regular Distros
TL;DR: Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro? Or is it more of a “this is the least work” to get setup?...