To be perfectly honest, anyone approaching Linux from Windows needs caveats so that they can make their mind up for themselves and pick what's best for them. Every distro (and Linux as a whole) has trade offs and things that will need to be considered.
> We're on a tech forum, where people probably need less handholding with tech gear than the general public does.
I'm not sure about that. I think the days of assuming people who can code or do another specialized tech sill are long over.
The amount of comments from people who prefer windows or mac or ubuntu and systemd because of convenience and abstraction (i.e. handholding) are plentiful.
And, once no longer a newb, Debian is easily one of the best distros to be in, for many purposes, long-term.
Why not start with one of the most popular and principled distros, and see whether it just works for you?
From there, if your eye ever starts wandering towards some strange other distro, you have a well-informed good baseline to compare against.