Both of them have their pros and cons. It's a matter of sacrificing convenience or security.
I2P is surely a go to for me over Tor/VPN when it comes to anonymity. You will come across variety of information which is not available on clearnet/tor, but clearnet has the upper hand in abundance.
You can find plenty of versions on Demonoid https://www.dnoid.to/. I've used them on bare metal and on virtualization.
I just checked my DNS blocked list. Topaz software do download their models from their repositories, but I haven't come across any issues. About safety, well, its upto your threat model.
I've tested Cyberpunk 2077 on Ubuntu (not my daily driver) and it works like you're playing on windows. Only downside is that you can't use ray tracing since Nvidia kept that tech proprietary and exclusive to windows for now.
See, Linux doesn't fully supports nvidia gpu, but still I'm having a great experience.
It's not really a hassle to configure your i2p node. I2p network recently went through a DDOS attack. Even during that point of time I had no issue surfing/torrenting.
You're thinking too hard. Chill.