I’ve definitely had Windows hard lock before and stop responding to the keyboard, from Win95 all the way to Win10. I have no experience with Win11 so I can’t speak for that, but all others have situations where it can happen.

In fact, Windows is bad enough that the disk usage being high can cause the system to stop responding until it’s done and drops back down.

Agreed, I’ve been running gaming-focused distros mostly because of the convenience of everything being ready and set up, but I’ve never had any issues on a non-gaming distro to set it up for gaming either.

Are there distros that are actually unsuitable for gaming, besides ones that are designed to be CLI-only or specific to antediluvian hardware?

I feel like gaming-specific distros just include stuff that you could otherwise just manually add to any other distro and make it suitable.