I don't know about that part (though would like to know as well), this is currently blocked on my pi-hole:

including my custom RegExs. This surely helps but there are domains constantly pop-up every now and then, so it's not fool-proof.

It isn't unknown and almost 10 years old but it's mostly overlooked. A great card game >> Faeria

Couldn't find another game like this.

They also put a fking anticheat on a 20 year old single player game.

Don't know about the other things but "focus follows mouse" is possible on Wayland. Well, it's possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.

You already got your answer so I won't repeat them. You cannot even replace the live TV app on your smart TV. I spent a somewhat huge time to fix what's wrong on my mother's TV but sadly best I could do was sideloading apps and blocking ad channels on pi-hole. Probably the best way is to buy Raspberry-Pi and install LibreElec. At least that's I'll suggest next time we need such device.

Meanwhile here I am with ghostwriter

Not sure about this. I have a couple friend who own ~5k games on Steam and all they play is either Dota 2 or CS2. It's been like that for years and I don't see any improvement on that state. :)

The one playing dead is my spirit animal.

If you like traditional desktop approach, just go with Linux Mint. If you wanna try something different, go with PopOS. You can always use Steam's Big Picture mod if you want Steam Deck UI.

Obviously the distro choices are limitless but it's a good idea to start with one of these.

It was perfect. I don't understand why everything must lose its soul with material design.

I guess people just trying to do things with what they have. I had a friend who plays LoL on a Mac. She also used Steam on it but there were very few games.

You can ask for a data request from Reddit. That way you'll get everything you did as a text file (csv).