Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.
That smells like survivorship bias. Your dataset is skewed by loose caps being way harder to find due to being smaller. It stands to reason that all those bottles without a cap you find will have also had their cap littered in the vast majority of cases.