Mint was my distro of choice for a while as well. Unfortunately, when I jumped back into linux for the second time after several years back on windows about a year ago, it had changed very little. In fact it had yet to resolve several bugs that I had struggled with, years before.
KDE meanwhile has been the desktop UI upgrade I always wanted. I’ve used gnome a bit as well, and it too has come a long way, I hope PopOS works out for you.
If you want, you can put Ventoy on your USB instead of making it into a boot drive for one iso at a time. Once Ventoy is installed onto a usb drive, you can just pop .iso files onto it and it will ask which one you want when you boot from it. This way you can try a dozen distros with very little hassle. AND it still works as a normal usb drive too, you can put other files onto it and Ventoy will just ignore anything that isn’t an iso.