I think the main pain point of distro hopping is learning a new package manager, I discovered Nix a while ago, it works on every single OS, has the biggest package repo out there. I replaced Homebrew on my mac with it. If this piques your interest, give it a go. Later, you can integrate with Home-manager to manage all of your program config to have a reproducible dev environment on any machine, as described in the tutorial here.
The catch is it’s really advanced and got steep learning curve. You can adopt gradually tho. Just get started with nix-shell
and nix-env
not if what you want to install is already cached on the server, which is mostly the case