Stripped socks are not a requirement. They are a bonus, though (if you have the legs for them! ;-P ).
Nice job getting your system going! The full plunge is good to do as dual-booting just keeps you anchored in the past. I will admit, I keep images of my old OSes and run them as a VM if needed. Helps to go back and look at history or saved passwords, etc. I have Mint on several systems, but am changing to CachyOS on my desktop gamer for its better gaming posture. Mint is perfectly fine for most anything. You just need to tweak it to suit your scenario. Mint does also have a nice advantage of being widely used and therefore having greater search results when troubleshooting.
For Apple hardware, lots of folks use Asahi Linux. You might give that a look.
You can also take a peek at https://distrowatch.com/ to see what distros are popular and/or of interest to you.
I like to run different distros to keep myself fresh. I currently run Fedora, EndeavourOS, Solus, Mint, PopOS, CachyOS and Debian. These are on laptops, VMs and desktops (both large and mini systems).
Welcome and best of luck!