While it is theoretically true that you can turn one distro into another, in practice it’s not worth it. It’s the same thing as trying to sell someone on “you never need to reboot to apply updates or fix things.” Ye, technically true, but unless you’re maintaining huge corporate servers where downtime is measured in dollars, 9 times out of 10, it’s just easier to reboot and see if it fixes the issue. And yes, it will often still fix the issue.

The reason for distro hopping etc is because picking a distro is essentially choosing your defaults/ideology/character alignment. There are no wrong answers. Just go with what feels right. Newbies should distro hop to see how they align, experienced users should do it for fun and to see if a different way suits them better.

We should be herding beginners towards beginner friendly distros so they don’t run into a cliff of a learning curve, but which specific one is basically arbitrary.

As for your other examples: Don’t let your dreams be dreams. You can 100% use batocera as server if you like, it’s entirely possible. You’re just going to have to dedicate a shitload of time coercing into a server shape… but nothing’s stopping you