laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install

Package managers make this a breeze to the point that people upload their personal script to github so they can run one command to get all of their software and theming on a new PC lol.

No need to even go that far, just pop open the app "store" (everything is free lol) and just click away at everything you want. Can probably get most of your stuff in 10 minutes tops.

What even are the significant differences with different distros?

It boils down to how effective the user experience & preference is and what the backend is built on (which usually affects user experience & preference lol).

Mint is highly recommended because it cleans up a ton of the random stuff from Ubuntu upstream and maintains a clean and low cost (cpu/ram usage) desktop environment that's very easy to use. It's highly recommended for anyone who is new or inexperienced with linux or OSs in general and just wants to get on with life. The single downside is that its packages are not the latest and greatest, so its great for everything except gaming where you want the new stuff like drivers, proton upgrades, new features, etc.

Fedora is what Ubuntu was 15 years ago, which is best all around user experience. It chooses very sensible but cutting edge packages which gives you excellent performance benefits of new tech like BTRFS/XFS without losing out on stability. It's also the distro Linus himself uses because he finds it easy to just install and again, get on with life lol. Fedora also has excellent user docs and forums which is great if you need help with something. Only downside is I think you have to flick a switch (or run a command) to enable all video codecs because they don't ship it on their main package repository since H264 & HEVC have weird licensing issues.

Bazzite is a downstream of Fedora Silverblue, which is an atomic distro that makes it really hard to screw something up by using a read only root and rollback-able updates, similar to Android and SteamOS. It was specifically designed to make gaming on handhelds an easy out of box experience so you don't have to manually set up stuff like touchscreen keyboards or power settings on non PC hardware. You can run it on PC if you'd like the benefit of the rollback image system which can unbork your machine super easy, though it already is quite hard to bork because the root filesystem is read only, so apps are installed in a similar way as Android apps (Flatpak).

Learning Linux is actually quite intuitive (thankfully), and everything from the GUI perspective is mostly the same, if not an outright improvement in several areas. I would highly recommend playing with the live install of whichever distro you pick along with the desktop environment to get a feel for how it looks before you commit to an install.

Desktop Environments are also not tied to distros. You can basically choose any DE on any distro (like Mint's Cinnamon on Fedora), but the two biggest ones are GNOME (Mac like) and KDE (Windows like). I think KDE is way better than GNOME, but you can play with both & more to see which one you prefer.

Your main issue to figure out when permanently switching is if there is any software or process that you rely on in Windows that would be different in Linux. For me it was switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (there are also more, like OnlyOffice), which was completely painless since it was like 95% the same and could open up docx just fine.

The other possible ones could be:

• Adobe stuff (some stuff like PS works, but it's a bit involved to setup the first time)
• Games that use kernel level anticheat (big nono in linux because it breaks security)

The second one is really what's keeping a lot of people from making a permanent change which I'm hoping Valve can change with the upcoming Steam Machine because even for Windows, its like running a rootkit that really should not have that level of access to your PC.

I don't play any games that utilize it, but you might and it won't work on linux until the publisher decides to let it: https://areweanticheatyet.com/. The comments are usually outdated back from when the game first released, so as long is it's green or blue, it should run out of box.

Some publishers (Epic Games mostly) are also just dicks that don't use kernel level in some games but still choose not to enable linux support when compiling their game, despite all the major anitcheat vendors supporting linux and even mac.

The good news is that for everything else, there's a pretty good chance you'll actually see an increase in performance from Windows. The biggest one for me was World of Warships which went from 2 minutes load times down to just 30 seconds on a hard drive, and about 15-20%+ FPS even when on an SSD.

Yeah, I get that. But you'll have to do that anyway and when the time comes, getting Linux will be there for you.
Regarding distros, it really doesn't matter at the beginning, hoping from distro to distro if you need it later is dead easy, most of the time it's as easy as running one command to install all the apps, and copying your /home/ dir, it will transfer wast majority of all your settings, if not all. Some apps are stubborn but those are outliers.
So the choice of a distro basically comes to a single thing you care about. Like, for example, some are "rolling release", which means they try to have all the libs and apps and other shit up to date, some are "stable", which means they don't update that often. Both have their ups and downs, personally I find rolling releases easier to deal with.
The biggest difference for a novice is what desktop environment is the default one, and that's basically a matter of preference (but actually KDE is the best of them, and that's my objective opinion).