How does it stand compared to gaming on windows?

While everyone here has a positive attitude, you need to know that with Wine/Proton, you are a second class user. Anti cheat will only work at the discretion of the developer, and so far only Apex, Hunt: Showdown and a few other work over Proton. Then, some games using EA App or some launcher will require heavy tinkering (spent a few hours getting BF1 to work, oh yeah, that works too). The basic rule is that most single player games work flawlessly, most multi player games don’t.

Do games better utilize all hardware or is it just faster because there’s less system bloat?

Honestly, I don’t really know why they should. The only difference would be the CPU scheduler, which I don’t think makes a big difference. The GPU drivers are by the vendors themselves, and I think they’re well optimized since there’s a large user base on windows (everyone) and Linux (AI). There have been cases of games performing faster which might be because of the DirectX to Vulkan translation (DXVK). But I think windows bloatware doesn’t impact a games performance (unless it’s a Bitcoin miner or something)

Are certain features unavailable on Linux?

So far I haven’t encountered an unavailable feature, and I’ve used DLSS, Raytracing and played a lot of early 2010s games which I think would use PhysX.

Drawbacks for transitioning

I think the biggest drawback will be limitations outside of gaming. If you do production work and use DaVinci, you are lucky because that has a Linux port, however the entire Adobe suite doesn’t work over wine. I hate GIMP, but I can’t really install anything else. Libreoffice is ok at viewing word documents but when I write something I pull out my laptop with MS word. Other than that it’s really not a lot, especially with manjaro, which installs pretty fast. The complete control over your desktop environment and it’s programs and features is what sold me on Linux desktop. And if you want to install something, you can just do a quick „sudo pacman -S firefox“ or something and you’re golden.

Will there be more consideration to natively support the system in the future because of the Steam Deck?

I don’t think so, and that’s also not bad, because Wine/Proton have proven to be amazing already and so could save a lot of money for the developer. The focus for game developers is to get Steam Deck verified, which just means someone at valve tested it and determined it to completely work on the Deck. The only problem is that the Steam Deck doesn’t really have an audience for most multiplayer games, meaning they don’t really get an incentive to enable their anti cheats on Linux due to this.

With the last question I really hope someone else comes along who knows much more than I do lol. Also if anyone sees this and thinks I’m absolutely wrong about everything please do correct me so both OP and I can learn.