The problem is not the difficulties of any of these… if you are reasonably skilled you’ll master any of them… given enough time.

When I was a student I maintained a Slackware up/running/updated for my gf at the time… was it hard? No but it was a gigantic waste of time… and what I learned is not comparable to the amount of wasted time.

Same with OpenBSD.. I love that operating system for networking (the most elegant firewall/netfilter I ever seen) but (1) didn’t have support for multi cpu for a looong time (2) drivers either worked out of box magically or good luck

All people you mentioned have better things to do than babysit an operating system and Debian (fedora I don’t use for decade, can’t say) is a pretty reasonable compromise of not treating you like a kid and not making you waste time