Kinda figured you wouldn't want to be hit with a wall of text... lol 🫣

couldn’t play games... I almost don’t play games anymore...

We have Valve Proton now, that while not-perfect works most of the time. Wikipedia has an excerpt on it. You can use this guide to enable it in steam.

...but I doubt the least common denominator ubuntu is the right choice...

It could be, but often something like Linux Mint or ZorinOS can be a better fit. It depends on you're use-case.

Which instances/communities are going to be the best for a beginner? I’m going to need help with a lot of stuff...

I'm not too sure, I'm not really a beginner anymore... but !linux@lemmy.ml is open to questions, I've personally been answering questions there too. There's also !linuxquestions@lemmy.world & !linux@lemmy.world.
You can always hmu.

I remember trying to install network drivers was a pain in my ass

Generally there already included in the kernel. If not, it can be a pain.
A clever work around I came up with is to use USB tethering with your phone to share WiFi which works 99% of the time, then from there you can add the drivers more easily.

using the command line

Not too hard to learn, unless you're writing scripts you don't need to know that much.
You can use man command, command -h or tealdeer for help pages.
You can watch this 100s video for a real quick overview of bash, and this 20m video for a full quick and easy Terminal/Bash beginner tutorial.
The vast majority of this is transferable to other shells like Zsh.

operators

Ampersand Operator (&): Runs a Linux command in the background.
Semi-Colon Operator (;): Runs multiple commands.
AND Operator (&&): Runs the second command only if the first command succeeds.
OR Operator (||): Conditionally executes the second command.
Cheatsheet for more.

the filesystem and filetypes were unfamiliar and confusing for that reason

man file-hierarchy 😜
There's not much different for filetypes, I mean Linux uses a combo of mimetype/magic numbers and file extensions e.g. image".example" for identifying filetype.
I guess maybe you're confused about shell scripts.sh, binary.bin filetypes? those are executables like .exe.
If you have a specific question, that'd be easier to answer.

Where do I start?

Probably Ventoy to make distro hopping easier. Here's a good video on it from a great YT'r. Just use use the live environment to mess around and see which one you like/works best for you.