It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.

NobaraOS is Fedora based and has solved a lot of these issues. They have a separate ISO to use if you have an Nvidia card that will handle all the akmods drivers for you for example.

I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.

It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.

Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.

Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.

Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.

To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.

I absolute love KDE Plasma but I finally gave up for Mint Cinnamon LTS.

It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.

I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.

Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.

If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.

I couldn't get Rocksmith 2014 running on Mint, which was a real PITA for me

CachyOS is not an immutable distro.