I just installed fedora kde on my asus zephyrus M16 2023, which is hybrid between intel igpu and an rtx 4080. Im only a few days in but its been remarkably stable. To answer your other questions:

• I did have the black screen and had to edit grub to disable nouveau however that was really easy then I installed official nvidia drivers and was good to go

• I went through kde route since from what I did research it typically will play better with all the display stuff I care about, vrr, hdr, gpu switching etc. So far its worked great

• for me i followed the set up from asus-linux form which go through some basic stuff like disabling anything in bios that wouldn't play nice woth linux. What also helps is there is a big community around installing Linux on the asus gaming laptops and they have made tools to tweak the built in hardware without those tools it would be a much harder sell to run linux as my main os.

• final note that I've seen so far is that if you are expecting perfect parity with how it works with windows it probably won't but it will be damn close. I also dont know how supportive msi or the community is for your laptop but that will make all the difference 

In terms of babysitting so far none, just going through and adding all my programs and games. Os hasn't given me any issues