In my opinion, go with Ubuntu. First, any issues you have with Ubuntu can be fixed easily; snaps can be easily removed, as well as amazon links, gnome tweaks and the rest. Second, unlike Debian, Ubuntu has the hardware enablement stack, which means that any supported Ubuntu release will run on hardware newer than that release, and your graphics card should run with a much newer driver. Any gaming distros built on Ubuntu are probably fine, but will only give marginal improvement to FPS.
Nah, building from source takes a few minutes unless you are building a web browser.