Bazzite rocks, especially for gaming. I started with Ubuntu, did arch for a while (which was a great learning experience), and have been on bazzite for years now.
Pop and mint seem like great choices too if plug-and-play gaming isn't your main focus.
I have a Fairphone 5 with eOS, and I'm happy. Their service is painfully slow, but otherwise professional and reliable. You can run into headaches when flashing eOS if you are not super-cautious (dm mefor details if you like), but the instructions are good, and you can also buy various phones direct from Murena with eOS already installed.