For sure. I think there's a happy medium for those who might not go for the Gentoo approach. (I'm a veteran of Gentoo as well, by the way. :) )

The extreme opposite of that is probably fearing to touch anything once the system is up and running. There are certainly Windows users like that. IT folks have one or two in their families who regularly try to rope them into doing free tech support. ("Sorry, Aunt Debbie, but I haven't touched any version of Windows since XP. No, Aunt Debbie, I don't 'build computers' for my job. That's a different department. No, Aunt Debbie, I don't know how to recover deleted emails in Hotmail. I've never used Hotmail.") I wouldn't want folks to fall into a habit of being afraid of their Linux system.

And of course, the Gentoo or LFS approach is way too far on the other end of the spectrum for some.

But I definitely wasn't advocating that OP take the "break all the things and learn how to recompile your Kernel to enable debugging with GDB so you can figure out why such-and-such USB device isn't working correctly." (Unless of course OP wants to do that. In which case, knock yourself out, OP!)

I used OpenSUSE before Gentoo. I'm glad I did. It got me some basic bearings in the Linux ecosystem in a gentle way that didn't make me want to give up and reinstall Windows. I switched to Gentoo basically when I started to realize how limiting relying on the OpenSUSE guis for installing and configuring things was. (I could tell there was a hidden layer of stuff going on behind those guis. And shying away from the deep lore was keeping me from doing things I could otherwise do.)

But even if I thought a particular person had a strong likelihood of taking the Gentoo approach at some point, I'd probably recommend something like Mint until they themselves wanted to dig deeper. And if that never happened, that's fine too.

And, let's be honest. There's a chance that Mint could break as well even if OP isn't doing reckless things solely for the sake of learning. (I'd say the same about Windows for that matter.) At that point, OP's options are 1) figure out how to fix it and fix it or 2) wipe evrything and reinstall from scratch. Either way, something will have been learned in the process.

So, to OP, don't feel pressured to do all the deep lore stuff unless/until you find yourself wanting to. But also you might be better off if you aren't so scared to try to do things that you don't try to customize your system for your needs in even very simple ways.

And again, good luck!