You're going to get a hundred different answers about distros. There are a lot of knowledgeable people who forget what the beginner experience is like.

Mint is universally recommended and well loved. It works well and you can't go wrong. It uses Cinammon desktop environment and I wanted KDE so I didn't go for it.

Fredora is also top tier and again you can't go wrong. This comes in many flavours (including Bazzite which is an immutable Fedora distro pre-set towards gaming, or Nobara).

When you're wiping your drive anyway and setting up new and fresh, then this is the best time to install different distros and test drive them for a few hours/days. Ultimately this is not a life changing decision; and your choice can always be changed later.

I personally did all this a year ago and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been great and this distro doesn't get recommended enough. The desktop environment will be your daily use experience. The underlying distro will be your mechanics under the hood. I would suggest you pick something "beginner friendly" unless you really want to take on a steeper learning curve.