More technology does not fix daft manoeuvres! You do learn by your mistakes but keep the environment as simple as possible and add complexity later. Just like I didn’t back in the day! Mind you we lived in greyscale back then.
I’ve been a Linux sysadmin (and I have a lot of customers) for around 25 years now and only during the last 18 months have I bothered with something funky like ZFS - Proxmox is why and that’s thanks to Broadcom deciding to fuck up VMware. I have done a lot of migrations and many more to follow. BTRFS is coming along but it is not for me quite yet.
Backups are golden. Even a simple rsync of /home and /etc to a USB stick or two will do for starters. If you want a challenge then try getting the Veeam agent for Linux working, with secure boot. I suggest not yet (secure boot). However, Veeam do a community edition which is free for 10 workloads (VMs/agents). I recently recovered a HP laptop running Home Assistant to a Thinkpad and everything just worked apart from the network, which is pretty reasonable and it took about 20 minutes.
So, I suggest that you get your backups in order first and then you can muck about with confidence. If you have some time and energy then do have a go at Gentoo and/or Arch. I ran Gentoo as my daily driver for some years and now I never fear anything IT related.
Who on earth actually cares? Those 12% are probably not really wrong either, apparently.
Can you fiddle up a weird black screen with lots of $ and # symbols? Yes, its a Unix and its probably Linux.
MacOS is odd because I say so and because most users of it will insist on their screen being darkened and brightened at the same time. I don’t like black being rammed into my eyes.