This is right. I am running Pop OS, but will make the jump to Arch when I have time. I don't want to wait for the distro maintainers to release new kernels/language versions/etc. And once you start changing those things, the benefit of the distro starts to fade away.
A nice middle ground is Manjaro (there's a nice GUI to select your kernel). Though I'm not sure what nvidia settings Pop uses, because I still have the above issues with Manjaro. But this may again be laptop centric.
I've used Manjaro on two legacy laptops and a fairly recent desktop and I can only vote for it for almost anything you would want to do with your machine. It's a very lightweight and well-supported distro that has outperformed machines that are on paper twice the speed of the one it's installed on.
Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.
