It’s polished and easy to use, it leverages all the work that goes into Debian and Ubuntu, but it’s still Linux under the hood and doesn’t forbid you from getting into the weeds.
I run Mint Cinnamon on my work machine, developing software for embedded Linux products, and I haven’t had any regrets.
You owe it to yourself to try it out! I recommend dual booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon for a while and have your windows install to fall back on to. That or one of the gaming-specific distributions, but from what I’ve seen Mint does all with gaming too. It’s a good all-around starting place, and there are a lot of resources because it’s popular and built off of the most popular distro. I installed it on my work machine (software engineering) and I’ve felt no lack of capability or a need to switch to a more “hardcore” distro.