I use Aurora DX instead which has the same Universal Blue core as Bazzite. I’ll echo what you say about distrobox- its fantastic once you realize how capable it is. You can set up a container for each development environment you need and never worry about conflicts or anything like that. Install SDKs, editors, IDEs, etc. and as you say, just run them as if they were on the host OS. Your container can be based on Fedora, Ubuntu, NixOS, and many more- so choose whatever you’re most comfortable with and just get to work. Aurora DX also comes with brew setup which can provide a lot of packages to run on the host as well, but I don’t often feel the need to do so.
I do wish I could add certain features of Bazzite to Aurora, like the gamescope session and the ujust waydroid script.
I’m also having a mostly good experience with the same GPU using Aurora. One small issue I noticed is that certain context menus in steam appear corrupted sometimes. Have had no problem with games themselves.