Been through the same situation. Find a distro that you like, any decently user friendly distro will handle setting up the dual boot for you.

No need to reinstall games etc, just make sure you partition has enough storage for linux and pick that part during the install.

After that start slowly transitioning your games to linux. In steam toggle the compatibility setting, this will try to run proton over your games. Then only boot into windows when its necessary for VR/online games.

VM’s for gaming is not the best use case, lots of gpu needed…

Yeah that’s probable. Since changing some settings on the connections limits it has already increased, still not as much as peak download like you said.