I use multiple monitors with the latest Nvidia drivers and my 3070. It works fine for me. I've been using Linux off and on as a home desktop for 20 years. It's definitely gotten better, but still some special use cases don't work out of the box where it does on Windows. I.e. top tier video games.
Discussion
I'm running a 3070 and an A2000 in different machines. Both running on Xorg due to nvidia and work issues. Our applications we're developing for work still use legacy OpenGL and Qt 5.15, so none of the 3D stuff renders in Wayland.
On my laptop, which I'm forced to use due to logistical issues, xfce4 had issues with putting the external monitor on the left side, and a few issues with controlling where things launched. I'm sure I could have debugged it, unfortunately I don't have tinker time right now.
MATE is great, since I started in Linux many moons ago (like you) the old gnome look actually works for me and I know where everything is. So far, it's been nice.
I just got off a stretch of running Arch, which is a heck of a distro and has some of the best documentation I've ever seen in an open source project. I'm on fedora now because we will be deploying to RHEL, so it's a bit less mental context switching.
I'm really hoping that work lets me upgrade our legacy code to support Wayland, as none of my issues are present there.