Not so much toggled, but you can break out of it. At that point it just becomes a fedora install with a somewhat different set of defaults.

Hmm. Well I was on a tear of trying new operating systems trying to get a bit of bleeding edge kit working. I was about to be traveling and I needed it to just work. Bazzite had a release specific to my model... and it all seemed hunky dory, until it wasn't and I couldn't get in and wrench. I think in that week I probably went through 20+ different ISO's and install scripts trying to get to an install that would let me use the GPU acceleration I paid for. Tried fedora, bazzite (and bazzite did work, but I had issues with the wifi/ blue tooth driver, but I had to do containers/ sandboxes to actually use RoCM), ubuntu, others.

I ended up on Ubuntu for this machine because at least I can wrench on things, and I wasn't prepared to take the Arch jump off the diving board (at least not on a new machine before traveling). And its been "fine".

But I genuinely do no like the Ubuntu experience. Once I can slick this machine (when I'm done with my current project), I'm going to go to Fedora because that should allow me to stay with the most up to date kernel.

No, I don’t think that’s correct

No, they don't. Its actually described. Distrowatch just tracks how many clicks the pages on Distrowatch has. That's all. But lot of people don't understand and take these numbers as general popularity index.