I would recommend you visit distrowatch.org as they have reviews of a great many distros over a long period. That would prepare you to form an opinion on what kind of experience you want to have.
Example - UI, ie. Desktop Environment: chose Gnome if you like Apples way of making things very polished and giving the user few (visible) options to tinker. Choose KDE if you like a “busy” UI with *all* the options exposed and a ton of desktop widgets. Choose MATE or LXDE if you like a snappy and minimalist approach.
Possibly the biggest differentiator between distros is their native package manager. You can take any distro and swap out eg. KDE for Gnome, but the package manager is fundamental and probably(?) impossible to replace fully.
Example: All the Debian based distros use DEB packages. You’ll find a ton, though dine distros lag behind the most recent versions. Others use Redhat’s RPM system, while still others build everything from source (which is slow as fuck but gets you to the cutting edge with all the knobs and dials). There’s also the Snap and Flatpak systems which strive to supply platform agnostic packages, but do so with very different approaches.
Good luck!
Even if you only tinker with OS installation occasionally, Ventoy is a damn godsend!
Forget about “burning” ISO files to a usb stick, just put a bunch of raw ISO files on the stick and Ventoy will give you a nice boot menu to select from them - and a separate USB partition for user data as well. It’s glorious.