I have only skimmed the comments so someone might have already mentioned it, but distrowatch.com is an excellent site to get your head around the differences between distros. For instance, they have a direct comparison page that will list all the package and kernel versions side by side. Here is Mint and Arch - as you can see, Mint is at a 6.14 kernel (fine for most apps and hardware) but Arch has the very recent 7.2.11, which if you have very new hardware, could matter to you.

I run Debian, which has even older packages and kernel, and everything works great. Very recently though, I switched my firefox to the flatpak version, because the Debian package version didn't have the fairly recent Split View feature, where you can put two sites side by side in your browser window - this has been desperately needed for as long as we've had wide screens. So that's one example of a more recent package being more desirable.

And speaking of Flatpak, that's yet another reason not to sweat your distro, cause you are not just limited to your apt packages, you can use snaps, you can use flatpak, You can use Nix. There's endless ways now of getting the latest version of anything, on any version of Linux.

Don't sweat it.