like drivers are a mess compared to Linux

Maybe but if you google (which most users use for their daily driver, even on IOS/Android) you get pointed to the manufacturers who have the driver installers as simple as possible. These also come with auto updaters.

I mean you could not use the tools the manufacturers are providing, but at that point I'd argue you're trying to be a tech savy user when they offered a way not to.

And very, very, very few edge cases are more difficult than that. most are plug-n-play (which to be fair, Linux has as well)

If you try to google a result for Linux you get a bunch of results for distributions that might not be yours. if you try to google a result for your distro you might get a result from years ago that is strongly not recommended anymore (especially if it leads to that Ubuntutalks website). And then the absolute worst case scenario, where you google and don't actually find what you're looking for, because the manufacturer does nothing with Linux and nobody cares about the problem.

A lot of windows was made around things that non-savy users were breaking. Nowadays a lot of the major issues I see people talk about are because they tried to do something that was very clearly something that they didn't want to be done.

I don't understand how you consider Windows drivers to be a mess compared to Linux? Do you mean for power users who like to manually configure their own drivers? Windows 10 and 11 are just plug and play with any device I can think of that an average user would use.

I don't use Windows as my daily driver, but I have done a lot of IT work for people who do use Windows, so maybe I'm missing something.