Since you are learning and experimenting with Btrfs and subvolumes anyway: as an alternative to installing in a VM, consider testing Garuda by installing in subvolumes instead.
You can set up a fresh installation within the span of a few minutes, tinker around as much as you like, then delete the subvolumes when you are finished if you like and it’s like they were never there. No need to add partitions to the disk or resize filesystems.
A rough outline of what this looks like is on the Garuda Wiki page:
Bear in mind that guide is written assuming the default subvolume layout of a Garuda install–obviously adjust according to whatever the subvolume layout of the base system happens to be. The important thing is to rename the subvolumes so that the default subvolumes that Garuda will set up are not in use when the installer runs.
See also this lengthy topic for a more extreme example of this kind of setup:
The community is great! The forum is a lot of fun. Interestingly, unlike this topic most of the issues in the forum are related to Garuda Linux. 
By the way:
The forum software is Discourse. As you mentioned, a lot of distros use Discourse for their forums (fora?). They all end up slightly different from each other due to the variety settings available, including various plugins that can be added for enabling extra features, etc.
The Garuda Linux forum, of course, has the very best plugins available. 