I don't think it is only for bragging rights, while in a vacuum the mainline kernel should be good enough for gaming, it is not really good when there are multiple tasks competing for the CPU attention (and this is especially bad for gaming because this can create a frame spike, ruining the game experience especially for multiplayer games). I think fixing this particular issue is one of the reasons Bore scheduler was created.

Speaking as a long time gamer, at least on Ubuntu, I've never seen the issue you're describing.

Try running a long video conversion job that uses up all cores while running a game, no matter how much you fiddle with scheduling priority the performance in the game might drop by 50% and frame times will spike multiple times over. Even if you try reserving some cores for the game, performance will still be much lower.

Not even close. An -rt kernel, scheduler, up to date MESA drivers and the like can make a distro much faster for modern games than a server-balanced one which is often set to yield a high I/O thorughput but bad multimedia performance.

It's only fps bragging rights if you go from something like 180 to 190 fps. But for other person on slower hardware that may mean for example hitting consistent 60+ fps and eliminating stutter.

This BORE scheduler is genuinely interesting and has little to do with FPS in games.

Or they lower the bar for someone that wishes to pick up Linux for gaming but are not comfortable or able to massage the distro it is based on into something gaming-compatible.

Thats a weird and rather baseless assumption for you to make. They dont trade stability nor security, their tradeoff is package compatibility between x86 versions and focusing on execution latency rather than total throughput.

Bazzite is the opposite of that.