I had to deal with FIPS once because the company I worked for shipped a custom Linux distribution with the product and we had to essentially shoe-horn in some Red Hat OpenSSL packages to get it to meet FIPS requirements. What's funny is that after the customer enabled FIPS, administration became much harder, and the encryption strength was strictly worse.

Anyway, needing FIPS is something of a niche requirement. Debian or Rocky are very sane choices as a default Linux distribution for general-purpose servers until you run up against special requirements.