Mastering the art of lurking 
I’ve been using wayland almost exclusively since 2020 because x-org doesn’t support multi refresh rate setups and it was driving me nuts to have everything run at 60hz. It’s been pretty smooth sailing because I use an AMD gpu. I have to admit that steam is indeed a lot buggier under wayland, I try to use gamescope for every game as that fixes most problems I have with them. My hope is that proton will use wayland for most games by the end of this or next year.
Debian’s wiki states that “Wayland is used by default in Debian 10 and newer” (on gnome, It’s also the the default for plasma 6 but that’ll take some time to get into debian as you say)
as others have pointed out, you can use systemd-cryptenroll to add your tpm as a way to unlock the disk at boot, security of this should be fine if secureboot is enabled (for this to work it will need to be anyway) and a password is set for the uefi. See the archwiki entry for setup info (command is as simple as systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=auto /dev/rootdrive, also the device needs to be encrypted with luks2, no idea if zorin uses that by default but you can convert luks1 to luks2 {backup ur headers first!})
debian (mx-linux has a kde version if you want less hasle then pure debian) or opensuse leap on the “stable” side, opensuse tumbleweed if you want more recent packages (i’ve never had it destroy itself like arch, its been very stable for a rolling distro)
2024 will be the year of the linux desktop
Is it actually any good? I’ve seen some benchmarks that were not very promising but perhaps that’ll change in the future ig.
Windows kept getting in the way of my productivity (I constantly needed to find workarounds for problems that didn’t exist or were much easier to solve on linux, and I couldn’t customize the ui to my liking) + it lacked basic things like a tabbed file-manager (before win11) and my hardware was getting slower so I jumped ship.
vorta is also a nice front-end for borg
Letting windows install on its own drive by removing the linux drive (otherwise it will select that drives efi partition), I use systemd boot and I just copied the EFI/Microsoft folder from the windows drive efi partition to the linux efi partition systemd-boot will auto detect it. As for minimal, just use windows 10 ltsc, or windows education and use a debloater tool that is trustworthy (I like winutill).