I have good experiences with both bazzite and nobara.

Bazzite is an immutable OS though. So installing additional packages requires you layering them on top. It works differently than the traditional OS. Though if you just use it for gaming and browsing you’ll likely never notice the difference.

Garuda also markets itself as a mainly gaming distro. I don’t have any real experience with that. I tried it, but it didn’t feel like it was for me.

I’ve happily used the former two though.

I think you’re reacting to the wrong person as I didn’t make the NIH claim, but merely explained its meaning. :)

I think “Not Invented Here”. Meaning he wants to build everything himself from scratch despite there being alternatives he can use instead.

E.g.: Building your own httprequest library rather than using the existing one which is good enough.