It’s a rabbit hole, you have to get fairly deep into it to start reaping some “benefits”. Even if you start with something easy like cinnamon mint, there’s a small chance it might break something on major upgrade. But it’s generally fairly easy to fix if you have some grasp on the system.
The best way to learn would be to just install something like arch or debian in a VM but do everything in manual steps while trying to understand what every step’s accomplishing.