The teenager me would have no problem, he had a (fairly) working Enlightenment config and tried an array of distros, and it was fun to tinker. But he had way, way more time, and didn't spend his own money on the gaming hardware.
With my 7 year old GTX 1080 and Ubuntu/Steam Proton I can still play most games at very high settings (except raytracing stuff).
Been a Linux user for over 20 years, still use it for work, and yes Proton does look great, but I don't see using it for gaming anytime soon.
The best part is that it's trivially easy. Most games with decent proton support will install just like a native game. No frills. No mess.
When the Linux experience is smooth, it's smooth. None of the fake Fullscreen BS. No memory paging quirks or other background processes causing stuttering. No automatically putting your game process in sleep mode. Freesync works. You get to keep your favorite window manager/desktop environment. If you are lucky, you can totally ditch windows today.
But I've been using Linux desktops for years on my laptops and virtual desktops, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect before changing my PC over.
But for games I'm completely intolerant of annoyances, which is why I took so long with this step.
I also have much, much less time than I did as a teenager, so I can only stomach console gaming at this point. Games need to Just Work.