You should be in a good place with a laptop with integrated intel/amd graphics, and an Intel wifi card. Graphics and wifi are the most common pain points when it comes to linux so you can narrow down and research from there. I've had good luck with Dell and Lenovo. Currently have a Lenovo yoga with touchscreen and everything except fingerprint scanner works out of the box.
There are some linux friendly OEMs too like framework, tuxedo, and ststem76 that are worth taking a look.
DNS filering alone doesn't work for YouTube in my experience.
Curious, why the constant switching? You haven't addressed what you're specifically looking for or how many of the other distros failed to meet your needs. Or is it just for fun and to try new things (a perfectly valid reason)?
For gaming you want something with recent kernel and packages as the space is evolving rapidly. I'd say check out Silverblue or Bazzite as they seem interesting well maintained projects on a solid foundation. But I may be biased, as a happy fedora user. I'd avoid anything too niche but that's just me.
I've been very happy on Fedora. It's been reliable and has up to date software and kernels.
Whoa this is cool, but I'm finding the voice to text to be quite buggy. Sometimes it works and other times all I get a bunch of emojis and weird symbols??
I learned early on you can't rely on them for factual information for reasons you stated.
I use them for creative writing tasks (drafting up emails, letters, etc), generating ideas, for creating excel formulas, basic python, vba functions, etc.
I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it's a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.