Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.
Short answer, no. There are advantages, but not worth it on an nvidia card. Wayland will replace Xorg very soon is a saying for over a decade, there’s reasons it hasn’t happened yet, nvidia is one of them.
Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
For starting up, just a meme, on the long run it’s nice to have a small system, but not that important i£ you have the disk to spare.
What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
Yes, the main one is “use the package manager”. The second one is keep your /home in a different partition.
Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?
I would say that any community is also a good resource, since people are usually helpful.
What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
Set your /home to a different partition, I know I already mentioned this but it will save your ass the first t*me you break your system and have to reinstall.