(I know that this is not the ideal solution, but) I had sucesss by installing a trimmed-down 'gamer' version of Windows 11 on a similarly high-specced PC, and it's still blazingly fast nearly a year later.

(If you go this route, you've got to be careful what's been trimmeed, mind, if you want to use it for general purposes - mine doesn't have WSL and seems to have damaged printing support, which is obviously suboptimal depending on your needs.)

How does one find such an edition?

Ameliorated Windows 10 is one "distro" I use and (blindly) trust. It lacks store app support (not a problem), .appx package support (annoying when you want Windows Terminal), creating new user accounts (unacceptable on any machine used by multiple people), and has questionable "security" decisions by default like requiring a separate admin password for elevation, disabling VBS scripts, and an ugly logon screen wallpaper that requires downloading and blindly trusting a PowerShell script from the Internet to change (https://git.ameliorated.info/Joe/amecs). Frankly... if you're using it for situations that need security, you're better off running the (documented) amelioration steps yourself than downloading shady ISOs and wallpaper changers from online.

Torrent sites, ideally combined wiith a legitimate serial #.

By people I think he meant "product managers", not users.