When I select proton-experimental as the version under force proton runtime, I actually see usage in rocm-smi, however I get a black screen or that weird "see behind my window effect I screenshotted" in another comment. When I let it choose, I can see the game but sit at 0% utilization.

I see the system you got came with a 4070 if was the elite or was custom?, Not sure if you try to reinstall pop is? Unless someone said it all ready. Its very weird that your video card giving you problem should just work.

which distro is it? there are many that were not made with gaming in mind

There's a program called amdgou_top you can use to see the breakdown of components on the GPU(s) and their utilization, as well as what apps are running on the GPU

OP, I didn't see if you'd confirmed that you'd enable Steam Play, see this article: https://support.system76.com/articles/linux-gaming

Kerbal Space Program has a Linux native client and a windows client. By default, Steam will try to install the Linux native client, which is using OpenGL and, apparently, doing software rendering.

You could try to troubleshoot why OpenGL is broken, you probably are missing an environmental variable or something to tell it to use a specific device and so it defaults to software. However, this is kind of a moot point. Development stopped on OpenGL in 2017 and so bugs and weirdness will continue to crop up and fixing it won't resolve your core issue (Which may be that you're just not using Proton).

If you're going to game on this system then you should do what most people do and enable Steam Play and let Steam download the Windows version of KSP and run it through Proton (aka Steam's version of WINE). Often the Windows versions of games are more supported than the Linux native versions and WINE/Proton do an excellent job of translating the underlying windows system calls into Linux-ese. Proton is the primary reason why gaming on Linux works, because it lets you just play the Windows version of games.

Your logs indicate that your graphics card is the default device for Vulkan and so it should just work as soon as you enable Steam Play. If you have any problems with other games (once you verify that you're using your graphics card) you can look them up on Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/) and see if you need to make any setting changes. KSP looks to have a Gold rating and appears to work with Proton without any changes.