Not to take anything away from your experience, but drawing conclusions from threads like those is not the whole picture. That will be skewed against people who use problematic hardware, and say things like "the Linux way is tweaking everything".
But it's really not. Linux is mainly for users, by users. You're going to a very diverse set of users and experiences. For every tweaker out there you're going to find someone like me who just wants a unix-like operating system, with Perl and Python and everything else available with a minimum of fuss. They just don't speak up very often, because there's not much to something that works.
Of course it's important to mention the problematic bits too, and there's been many. I've mostly run Debian for over twenty years, and there has been several times where I had to fix issues from migrations such as rootless, utf8, python3 things, and file format migrations. For a long time things like hot plugging monitors, projectors and printers were a bit of a gamble.
But for the most part it's given me an environment where I can use a wide range of tools from emacs to nmap, from git to latex without giving a second thought how to configure paths, and how to fix some random missing dependency for a package to build, or why nginx doesn't pick up the changed file date. All those things have been ironed out by someone who went before me. That's worth a lot.
> I buy laptops based on their hardware specs (screen, keyboard, trackpad, weight, ports) rather than their compatibility with an operating system
Yes, that pretty much explains everything.
That's a luxury available to users only of a completely dominant software platform.
A Mac user could never say that. If you want OSX you must carefully buy supported hardware. You can buy a hackintosh, but don't fill up threads with complaints how bad the suspend works, and that the picture quality of the webcam is subpar.
Speaking for myself, I know what software I want to use. I do not care about hardware specifications in any other way than it runs my software reliably. Sometimes that means you can pick any color you want, as long as it's black. Black as my laptop.