I would imagine that Debian (with the benefit of community+repository size and inertia) or Fedora (with the benefit of community+repository size, and something

I would imagine that Debian (with the benefit of community+repository size and inertia) or Fedora (with the benefit of community+repository size, and something adjacent to commercial support) might be the best bet for such a distribution. Rolling anything different is likely to fragment avenues for support. IMHO, even Linux Mint / Pop OS feel too niche. Rolling a custom distro is almost surely a bad idea.