Ignore the drama, if you like the distro then use it. All the big distros are influenced by the companies that use them but should a distro make a substantial.change you don't like you can move.

However I would always have the mentality that you may one day want to move or reinstall so its good to be ready.

As a minimum its a good idea from the outset to ensure data you would want to keep and migrate is kept somewhere secure and separate to the linux OS itself. That might be having a separate home partition and root partition (not essential but its made migeation for me much easier). However regardless of that always do have robust backups of all your home folder data anyway.

If you do end up tweaking and getting more technical its also a good habit if you tweak your system files (like fstab files etc) to try and keep backup copies of those away from the root folder structure should you need to rebuild your system with another distro or even a fresh install. I also even save copies of webpages where i got specific tips and tricks to achive things i wanted so i can redo it easier in the future - has saved me a lot of time when i do make major changes.

Another good thing to backup from time to time can be your /opt folder. Some software you install may end up there and can contain custom files (esp if you needed to do something manually or customise it - Jellyfin for me sits in /opt and i always fins it a bit annoying to set up between distros - ffmpeg, firewall and file permissions are recurrent issues for me every time).

Finally I'd suggest it can be good to backup a list of your flatpak packages and system installed packages into text files from time to time (this is easily done but how differs between distros). This can be a helpful reference to rebuild your preferred set up when starting from afresh with a new distro or reinstall. You'd eventually reinstall everything you need without that but i've found such lists have saved me a lot of time.

A distro change or reinstall could be years away but your future self will appreciate it if you have regualar backups of all thet stuff - makes reinstalling or migrating to a new distro a doddle. Also it gives you freedom to do it whenever you want - if you know its already all there its far less daunting.

How much you should do depends on how deep ypu get into twealing your system. A minimum is bakc up your home folder / personal files, anything more depends on what you end up getting up to with your system.