I'm noticing that installing a new distro and making it your main distro tends to be very stressful to me.

Here's a couple of reasons why:

There's this anxiety I get that is just crazy, like I need to set this thing up perfectly, meanwhile I have work to do.
And the thing you estimated to take 2 hours at most ends up being a full week.
Work starts to pile up but can't just shake the obsession with setting this thing up.

Another reason is that usually my main distro instance tends to be VERY customized.
So much that when you switch, you need to configure those things again, and troubleshoot a lot.

Troubleshooting isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that you're trying to troubleshoot with a machine that needs troubleshooting.

the shell, the editor, the terminal, the window manager, tmux, the notifications, the custom kb layout. it was all so neatly customized that fixing problems on the machine was manageable.

but without all that I feel like an idiot.

Even something as simple as keeping having youtube music to focus is now intermittent because you need to restart the X server.

Maybe my problem is that I don't do well for bootstrapping.

Anyhow, I'm really stressed right now, but I think it'll be worth it.