I set up a Talos bare metal cluster about a year ago, and documented the whole process on my website. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
I've only used Bottlerocket in relation to EKS, and even then my interaction with it was pretty limited so I have no idea how it fares as a standalone operating system.
My one big experience with it was the recent bug which (as I recall) attempted to harden the system by marking memory pages as no-execute, which caused virtual runtime languages like Java to basically break entirely when running on a node using this version of Bottlerocket.
It was fixed pretty quickly, but it did feel like a weird thing to slip through...