Plot twist: it was I, OP, all along! Let me explain why.

Whenever I see these distro recommendation threads, all kinds of people come out to make a comment. Many if not most are well-intentioned, but the kind of person that bothers me the most is the evangelist. The kind of person who's blind to the limitations and drawbacks of the thing they are espousing.

If you're gonna recommend a distro, I sure hope you'd have some personal experience with it. Otherwise, how do you know what it's limitations are? So to admit you've never used Bazzite even though you're recommending it, it just seems irresponsible. "You have a peanut allergy? Try this Pad Thai restaurant! I've never been there but I hear it's great!"

After discussing with a few more developer friends of mine, they advised me not to use an atomic/immutable distro, because setting it up for development is a chore. I'd apparently have to learn how to use distrobox, set up containers, and learn an entire other flavor of linux to set up a development environment. As a reminder, I did say in the OP that I needed something I could program on as well, and Bazzite sounds like a poor fit for that use case.

Maybe some haters of atomic distros. Never imagined people hating them more than me. But what if not this...