Some times you may need to install a few extra stuff to get a game to run properly, other times you may see a few visual glitches like a pop-up menu not rendering properly, but you’re unlikely to find any game that just can’t run on Linux unless the devs intentionally don’t want people to play it on Linux.
Check protondb for general compatibility of any games you play.
Sadly most times I needed one, I either didn’t know enough to be able to use it properly, or the PC was under too heavy a load that even the TTY was not responding.
Mint is often the most recommended distro, because whatever you may need to do in it, it tends to be easy-ish to figure out.
But these days I would strongly recommend in favor of some immutable distro like Bluefin/Aurora or Silverblue/kinoite. Instead of being easy to figure out how to do things on them, they make it so you won’t need to, ever.
It’s a complete paradigm shift and it might not be for everyone, but in the decades I’ve been using Linux for, I had never had such a smooth experience with any distro. Everything just works and you don’t need to think about the OS anymore.
However it won’t easily fit with some of the requirements you listed.
I would try finding some de-bloated windows iso and try the VM route anyway. If your pc can run windows directly without much trouble, it should be able to run a lighter version of it on a VM too. You can dedicate most of your hardware resources to the VM and just no run anything else alongside it when you are working on an iPhone.