Just go for whatever DE looks pretty to you, I personally like KDE. Don't be afraid to switch to a different desktop later on, its just a few packages to install most of the time.
As for distros, pick something established that looks good to you. You said you have experience, so you probably know what you want from a distro.
I ran arch on my machine a lot but recently switched to fedora for its simpler installation.
You know, I tried KDE recently on a UBUNTU install it's got some nice features, but man is it buggy when it comes to scaling on 4K monitors. Also, the UI is a little rough. I switched back to gnome.
Well the look and feel is subjective, I like KDE because it feels like what windows could have been if it was done well.
As for the scaling, I use it on a 1080PC laptop screen but also sometimes my 3440x1440 display and haven't really run into bad scaling. Were you using X11 or Wayland? I've been on Wayland for years.
