Eh, aside from GPU drivers -- which I download directly from nvidia anyway -- I don't feel like gaming is much affected by the distro packages being a couple years old. We pretty much just run Steam, Discord, and Chrome on these things, and those all have their own update schedule independent of the distro.
You're right because the games run in containers anyway, steam-runtime.
I'm hopeful that's been fixed by now, but when I switched to Linux a year ago I started with Debian, and had a lot of issues with input latency for games on Wayland. Switched to Fedora which was two KDE versions ahead and never had that issue again.