Depends what you want to do.

On distrobox, I installed a containerised version of Ubuntu that can interact with my host, sort of like WSL on windows. Anything I put in it remains isolated so I can’t install packages that break my system - and I can use apt to install whatever in want rather than rpm.

You could develop in a VM or container like distrobox, and tbh, the host can be whatever you need it to be. You dont actually have to move off Mint.

That being said, I dont see why you couldn’t just develop on Bazzite/atomic distros of your choice using flatpaks for IDEs. I believe it has c++ installed and you’d be able to layer whatever language you needed onto your atomic distro of choice.