Fedora’s swap on zram shouldn’t pose a problem - at most it won’t use the disk swap, but other distros still would.
Encryption is important but I wonder if OP would make much use out of it, given that he plans to bulk store his items in the cloud. The storage partition would be mostly for things “at hand”. And if necessary, as you said, some elbow grease lets you have encryption and still access it from all distros.
I don’t recommend OP to mount that partition directly to /home itself. It’s bound to create problems later on due to software in different versions interacting with software that may or may not be present depending on the distro. Mounting it inside some other directory (even inside /home, e.g. /home/username/storage) feels considerably safer.