If you have an NVIDIA GPU CachyOS performs significantly better at the moment, so I would go with that. For AMD GPUs it's more of a preference question.
Personally for dev work I tend to use things like Nix to keep the development packages out of the host, that sort of approach works regardless of distro.
> Do note that they make it very, very, very clear that their results are preliminary,
Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced some of the results they're seeing aren't caused by their methodology. I don't think they are either.
I moved a gaming pc with a 4070Ti from Win10 to Cachy 3 weeks ago and have been purposefully testing out various games to see if it's workable; I'm about 50 hours and 15 games deep now and the only thing that doesn't work reliably is HDR. Outside of that I haven't run into any issues I haven't seen on Windows as well.
I use mine every time I take the dog out for a walk so around 2 hours a day most days since I've had them which is over 2 years now, and I've yet to notice any battery degradation. There probably is some, but not enough to notice outside of actual measurements.
I think the mercurial log is not doing us any favors here, most of the first few pages is the history of the `quic` http/3 support branch which indeed Maxim is not working on. Scroll past it and he'll be much more prevalent.
See for example the log of stable-1.24: https://freenginx.org/hg/nginx/shortlog/420f96a6f7ac