I have an arguably bad piece of advice, but one I hadn’t seen in skimming the replies.
You could always install Windows in a VM. Libvirt and virt-manager offer a pleasant GUI experience so it’s easy to do. If you give the VM a heavy resource allotment (while leaving a reasonable amount for the host) it should still perform well. The VM video driver is the only place you take a not insignificant performance hit, but for A/V manipulation I don’t think it’ll matter. Unless you use GPU based video encoding. In which case it’ll be CPU bound now so slower. You can potentially do PCI pass through to your GPU but that adds complexity.
A big downside here is that as far as Windows is concerned, this is different “hardware” so it won’t activate based on your physical device. As I recall, it only allows the use of one core while unactivated which is pretty much unusable. So a pretty hefty expense relative to a personal VM, I think. But it is an option.
Arch is amazing for all of these reasons, and I agree that by design it’ll give you a lot of insight in to what’s under the hood that most other distos tuck away.
I’ve used it in the past and ended up moving away from it because it requires quite a bit more effort to maintain, which got tiresome.
Arch has an active and dedicated community, so obviously there’s a whole lot of people out there who feel it’s worth the effort. Maybe OP will too. But it’s not a distro to take on lightly.