It's my personal top candidates in the order of my preference (best to worst) from my notes when I was researching this topic for my parents. (funnily enough, they ultimately settled on kdenlive, despite not being very computer proficient, because they found more step by step yt guides for what they wanted to do with it)
All still actively maintained.
I played around with each of those for a bit some time ago and they were quite similar, so you can pick by your personal preference.
Interesting discussion, the opinions go both ways but the official ones seem to disregard some facts and base the decision on some arbitrary ones that were not listed in OPs linked article, which I find quite biased or at least untransparent.
to me that smells like what I said in the other comment:
Wayland might be a bit stricter when it comes to following specs and not implementing hacky workarounds. (or it could always be a bug)
I feel like, if a cable is high quality and up to spec, it will work with wayland. But if the signal integrity is below spec, wayland might fall back to slower signaling while x11 is more lax and ignores the issue and so a worse cable still works even if unnoticably below spec quality. Or the 4k over hdmi 1.3 is some hack that x11 supports and wayland doesn't because it's out of spec.
Now imagine solving that and becoming 25% more efficient, but still getting the same wage. (historically, the leadership rakes in all the profits without sharing when efficiency increases)
I'd rather be chill and blame some third party. Hail Atlassian.
I'm not actually working in the field, so I can't give you any advice there.
I studied a related topic, before pivoting into a different career. And I do hardware and drivers stuff in my free time sometimes for some fun projects.
Get one of those learning kits that come with most of SBC/MCUs (like raspberry pi or ESP32) which have a lot of random stuff (like LEDs, motors etc.) that you can hook up to the pins and write C programs to control them. Learn the different protocols that are used to talk to other devices, like i2c, uart, spi etc. and then buy some hardware that you can talk to via this protocol. Like a sensor, a gps module or an IMU or EEPROM.
It's conceptually pretty similar to how computers and device drivers do it. There is some communication protocol and you can write or read some values over it to use any device. It's just way easier to start small and build up experience from there.
check out the llm benchmarks as well down below