Gentoo seems fun, I wanna try it some day. I would also recommend Void if you're looking for a distro with a boring old binary package manager (it's what I use on my laptop). Although the package list in Void is rather barren, I would recommend installing Flatpak to help fill in the gaps for some of the missing packages. There's also Alpine if you wanna go balls deep into the minimalism rabbithole. What makes Alpine so difficult is that it's a musl libc distro, so anything that needs glibc (i.e. any "serious" gui application) needs to run through a compatibility layer like gcompat or flatpak. Void is available in both glibc and musl libc flavours.

The community aspect can definitely be a big hurdle. Most of the time if you search for something like " ubuntu", you can more or less blindly copy-paste the commands from the first result and it will work. With niche distros, you have to be able to interpolate instructions aimed at other distros and actually understand what you're doing. That why I would never recommend a non-systemd distro to someone who's new to linux.

By the way, what's your network issue? I'm no expert, but maybe I can try to help?