Hello, welcome (and hope you'll stay 
)
As I imagine you know, Garuda is based on Arch and Arch is not usually a recommended distro for newbies.
The main obstacle of Arch is usually believed to be the installation process (and the concept of creating everything from scratch), but this is solved with Garuda.
By the way that is a great "learning opportunity" . I laugh because that term is used a lot here recently.
The real hurdle, in my opinion, is starting with a "rolling release", and all the risks that come with being always (or almost always) on the "bleeding edge".
My advice is to look at this as an opportunity, to learn Arch package management well, try to understand why things sometimes go wrong and what can be done about it.
Arch makes available its almighty Wiki, which in my opinion is an absolute plus such that it is a compelling reason to choose Arch or a derivate.
Here in our forum you will always find a help and also several helpful tutorials.
For me, the ones in "Packages, repositories, pacman, pamac, AUR etc." in the FAQs and Tutorials TOC at first (but after getting properly familiar with pacman & Co.) were literally enlightening.
Most importantly: you have a technical background, you had to learn a lot, so you know how to "learn." What are you worried about? Jump on board! 
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