You should definitely just use what you like. If you're going with Debian, maybe go with stable instead of sid. Your games will work. Distros that are being labeled as "gaming" just have some things added for convenience, saving steps after installation. Hopping around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. I've used different ones over the years from different branches. It's good to know how they work. I can pacman. I can apt. I can dnf. I even used to apt-get and yum.

For what it's worth, Mint has a Debian-based version that I've heard great things about. It would probably have lots of the legwork done for you (getting flatpak, etc).

I use regular bookworm with steam/Mesa/proton installed as flatpak

Works great, 10/10

I use sid as my daily driver with official debiam steam packages etc, everything is really smooth since long time so if you want to try you should :)

I do my gaming on Bookworm with a handful of extras, and it works very well.

There is a certain group of people who insist that only the distros with the latest packages are good for gaming. Those people are wrong in most cases.

Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit from the latest kernel.

Unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.

Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, so choose one that makes you happy, not one that some shill claims is best for gaming. Even Debian Stable, contrary to the undeserved bashing it often gets by a certain kind of gamer, is generally excellent for gaming.