[…] Ubuntu based distros can’t deliver the best performance for gaming because they use older graphics stacks and kernels […]
I generally agree, altough PopOS specifically has a more recent kernel than Ubuntu. They’re currently on 6.6, which was the current release until a few days ago. I believe they also use newer mesa than Ubuntu, which should make it similar to rolling release distros in terms of performance.
This is why I recommend PopOS to people new to Linux, as few distros are newbie friendly with recent kernel+mesa. Most distros with recent packages either like to break on updates or don’t ship proprietary codecs by default.