If you are fine with VNs (visual novels) as games, there is Katawa Shoujo. There is a "remastered" version of it in F-Droid for android: https://f-droid.org/packages/sh.fhs.ksre/
Never assume Linux works like Windows. You'll be confused.
You also do not have to use Pop because it is generally praised for its easiness. There are a few other good and easy to use distros out there, like Fedora, Mint or openSUSE.
There are also a few DEs out there, with the two most popular ones being KDE Plasma and GNOME
While not all, you also should know a few very commonly used commands to use in the terminal and maybe some basic troubleshooting skills. You don't need to be using the terminal all the time, if at all. Some common stuff is pretty much doable with a GUI nowadays and you'll probably be installing your applications through the DEs builtin software center. Pop uses a customized GNOME, so you'll be using the GNOME Software Center. KDE has Discover.
Since you do game, I suggest you check out ProtonDB. This is a database of rankings of games that work with Proton (Wine) and some even natively. If you play games from Epic, GOG and/or Amazon Prime, you should check out the Heroic Games Launcher. For any other games, check out Lutris.
Do note that you might have a bad or good time depending on your GPU vendor. AMD generally works out of the box while NVIDIA might not work as nice as an AMD GPU out of the box. But I think Pop has the option to install the proprietaty NVIDIA drivers during installation, so make sure to select that if you have one. Nouveau isn't as good as the proprietary drivers.
Regarding your other software, I don't know whether Reaper will work with Wine. If you don't mind switching to an alternative, we have Kdenlive and GIMP or Krita.
I used podman. Though you probably can use Ansible, if you want it simple.
There are also a few container management UIs like yunohost that let you deploy Lemmy with a click, but last I checked, it used a very outdated version of Lemmy. There's also elest.io.
Depending on third party services for such stuff is generally bad. In fact, even the dev of Lemmyverse agrees with this:
I think that Lemmy needs some more discovery features, but I'm not sure that using an external website is the right way to implement it - That installs a centralized component to the system and also a single point of failure for discovery. - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3192#issuecomment-1597929774
When I first started out, I just browsed through the All feed, checked the Communities page and also found some new interesting ones from various communities. You also might want to check out https://lemmyverse.net/communities
You would break up over switching online platforms?