if you don't plan on being a bonafide do nothing else but gaming person then there's no reason to limit yourself like that, and i suspect given your background you should know what needs to be done for games to run appropriately
it might not explain it if you just blindly pick the GPD option but we're assuming most people are looking for the dumb route, not the you already knew it has upstream support route.
Thanks for catching that. The information on the introductory documentation was outdated anyways, so I removed the link from here. Here’s the Introductory Documentation on the Wayback Machine archive if you are interested to see what it stated.
From the first-time-user POV the entire bazzite experience and everything i could find (no i did not find FAQ with any of my searches) mislead me to think that I need the GPD-specific variant to get all my buttons and shit working
you can run multiple applications at the same time(game and spotify and browser) all while in game mode, and if you dont want game mode then its still possible to remove gamemode and boot into the desktop every time
in saying that i'd rather we just didn't have a separate GPD image if it brings people in just for them to get angry about not having installed the less opinionated version that runs worse and pisses casual users off on said devices