Ah yeah, i know what you mean. That can be overwhelming. There are a loooooot of choices, and the differences might be things I’ve never even heard of before.
I think a lot of these articles are written with the expectation that you will try several different versions after you learn to flash/boot. I think i ended up with 4 different forks i could boot from.
When I started, i went with Ubuntu first just because it seemed pretty stable and had support from a large company, but once I leanred how to boot Ubuntu it was easy to do the same steps for the other versions to try them out.