Gentoo ended my distro-hopping phase back in high-school/college student days (17-18 years ago). Top class documentation (the title moved to Arch in the meantime) and helpful, supportive and knowledgeable users of their community taught me so much about Linux. Additionally, although I'm not educated nor working in CS field, Gentoo got me curious about programming languages, build systems and compilers (as a hobbyist). I used it happily and exclusively for 6-7 years (then moved to Windows at work and Mac at home).
From summer of 2020 I restarted with Gentoo on my new home desktop.
I've been using Gentoo for years on my home desktop. Nothing has ever broken. Things are so much easier now than they used to be 10 years ago. I do run a very minimal system, though. I use sway as my window manager and no desktop environment. My hardware is pretty basic (mostly Intel).
I run Ubuntu on my work laptop (with i3 WM). Despite my desktop having a very measly dual-core Intel Pentium G3258 (a 10 year old budget CPU, although admittedly overclocked to the max) and my laptop having a much more recent quad-core i7, the Gentoo box absolutely flies compared to the Ubuntu one.
I've also successfully run Gentoo on an old Atom powered netbook. The only problem is it's too slow to run Firefox and the "modern web", but that can't be helped. I compiled the whole system on the netbook, although nowadays I would set up cross-compilation if I were to do it again.
I am running “full-blown” desktop with relatively minimal Plasma (I installed only the KDE software I actually need). The initial setup was quite straight-forward, without any tweaking or particular issues. I do use binary packages (available in Portage) for the stuff I do not care - like LibreOffice or Rust compiler.
Upgrades where you are expected to do something rarely happen and even then it is fairly simple.
The major downside is when you want to try out something - it takes time usually, so it is not instant as with binary distros and other OSes. For now, when I am not willing to wait, I just use Fedora VM to test stuff first.
Kde, wayland and pipewire are alright... I'm not sure what desktop apps you use, but I don't run into many cases where something isn't in portage... My personal overlay only has 3 packages in it.
From summer of 2020 I restarted with Gentoo on my new home desktop.
Thank you Gentoo for everything.