Yep, this is how I do it on my NAS, which is some RockPro64 board attached to WD Red spin drives. I have music, movies, game saves, documents, pics, etc. that equal around 1.5TB and I don’t seem to get excess scanning when “watch files” is turned on.

If you’re willing to forgo the GUI installer requirement, take a look at Void Linux. Pretty slim base installation, very stable and conservative package updates for a rolling release. Excelllent package manager. Downside might be smaller package selection than Debian or Arch.