None of those are "hobby projects" that are gonna disappear overnight. They're each downstream of another distro, focusing their efforts on serving a specific use case without shouldering the entire burden of packaging everything themselves. PopOS is literally the OS of a company that sells Linux computers, why are you calling it a "hobby project'?

I recommend agaisnt upstream distros as they're generic, a new user has to make changes to them to get them in a state for ie playing games reasonably well. And the further someone strays from the defaults of a distro, the less support they'll be able to get for their specific configuration. Starting with a distro that will require the fewest changes means having more or less the exact same setup as every other user of that distro, making it much easier to find support.

I see the "hobby project" argument trotted out a lot and not many actual examples of popuarly recommended distros that have actually shuttered since then. There are all years old projects, some quite old, with a good number of poeple working on them and whose work gets used on other distros. The one with the lowest bus number is CachyOS, and those are literally Arch maintainers whose work is being worked on being upstreamed to Arch itself.

The people recommending something like Bazzite tend to point to specific features - already set up for games and immutable, so a new user is very unlikely to put it in a state where the Bazzite community cannot help troubleshoot it, even layered changes can be undone with a single command to unfuck it and put it back into a known state that can be troubleshooted by someone that does not have a remote connection to the machine. Kinoite - which I doubt falls under what you'd consider to be "reasonable" - has that similar reproducible setup, but because its' not already set up for gaming it would take a considerable amount of effort for a new user to get it set up for that, with the layered changes making updates take a very long time compared to Bazzite.

People suggest distros specialized for a use case because the people behind these projects are talented and know what they're doing and their labor has value. The reflexive hate against them tends to not be nearlyh as informed, it's mostly just people who just use those upstream distros and do not have any in-depth understanding of any other distros and can't articulate why they're being maintained or what their relationship even is to upstream.

You'll notice these upstream projects do not make these same arguments against downstream projects. That's because they do not share the belief that downstream projects hurt users.