From the research I did a couple years ago, Office 2010 is the newest version that works out-of-the-box on Wine and the later versions have problems related to Windows Update functionality. Codeweaver’s CrossOver seems like it can run Office 2012 and later, but its paid software with their own patches to Wine.
For me, I’ve had a copy of Office 2007 on my system since 2021 and it seems to have all the important features of modern MS Office, so I wouldn’t stress about running the latest version if you have an older version on hand, unless it is older than Office 2007, because those only support the older Office file formats.
In my experience, gaming distros primary benefit is being preconfigured with apps and patches you’d install on a normal distro.
For normal distros, this difference isn’t big enough to impact your distro choice in most cases. The reason these get recommended is due to their post-install setup being easier than the distro its based on, hence being friendlier to new Linux users.
However, for immutable distros this is a big factor as it reduces the need for layering. Layering makes updating much slower, so less is always better.