Is it just my hardware? It is not your hardware

Am i using linux just wrongly for years? Not really

Is it my fault? Not really

The main issue from what I can tell is you are trying to play older windows games which can be pretty hit or miss.

Gaming on Linux has greatly improved over the last couple years (especially thanks to proton/steam deck) but if you are trying to run older games that were never designed to run to it or you want to play online games with aggressive anti-cheat it is still going to be a bit of a struggle.

I would recommend sticking to an Arch based distro like EndeavourOS (as it is similar to the SteamOS) or a Debain based distro and not swap around too much so you can get a feel for it without having a bunch of things change on you all the time like package names and the like.

All that said if your jam is older windows games and you have access to windows and are tired of messing with the OS and just want to play games just use windows, try linux another day.