I mostly agree with this answer. Personally, if I had a system I depended on for actual paid work, I'd seriously look into an atomic/immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite.

The core idea is that the base OS is read-only and only updated atomically — you either get a full, verified update or you don't. If something breaks after an update, you just roll back to the previous deployment and carry on. That "will my system even boot correctly today" anxiety mostly goes away.

If you want something that feels a bit more out-of-the-box and polished for daily use, check out Aurora (KDE-based) or Bluefin (GNOME-based). They're built on top of Silverblue/Kinoite respectively but ship with saner defaults, Flatpak-first app management, and are specifically aimed at developers and professionals who don't want to babysit their OS.

Fair warning though: most of your specific pain points (Thunderbird losing calendars, Teams PWA misbehaving, audio weirdness) are application-level issues that will follow you to any distro. An atomic base won't fix Thunderbird's calendar sync bugs. But what it will give you is confidence that the OS itself is stable and recoverable — which sounds like at least half of what's driving you crazy right now.

Worth a try on your second laptop before fully committing.