Nah, building from source takes a few minutes unless you are building a web browser.

I understand it completely. However, my point of view is that, even in the case of the Amazon searches, it was easily disableable. I prefer Ubuntu flavors over base Ubuntu, which are run by the community and only do the bare minimum for Canonical to approve them as flavors (like add firefox as a snap). All of that bare minimum work can be easily undone in my opinion. Though, I understand avoiding Canonical when possible.

In my opinion, go with Ubuntu. First, any issues you have with Ubuntu can be fixed easily; snaps can be easily removed, as well as amazon links, gnome tweaks and the rest. Second, unlike Debian, Ubuntu has the hardware enablement stack, which means that any supported Ubuntu release will run on hardware newer than that release, and your graphics card should run with a much newer driver. Any gaming distros built on Ubuntu are probably fine, but will only give marginal improvement to FPS.