Wayland has proper scaling and should be the way of the future. Many apps are starting to properly support it, which should bring a few advantages.
Regarding NVIDIA, what I’ve heard is that with the latest proprietary drivers, there are very few issues (although I can’t promise you anything, currently using fedora KDE on a Mac of all things).
Bloat is relative. It all depends on what your hardware is, and as such, on how many resources you’re willing to “waste” for convenience.
The arch wiki is a really decent resource.
And I wish I knew that NVIDIA proprietary drivers don’t get installed by default in a lot of distro, but they’re usually well maintained by most distro maintainers