It's a form of Stockholm Syndrome for most people. They'll have some bit of software they imagine is irreplaceable because they have some special use case that means that they just have to tolerate the relentless abuse. Or some other excuse. Whatever. It all boils down to people being afraid of change.

Most of that fear is not all that rational. It's not unlike kidnap victims falling in love with their captors. Your mind just tries to make the most of what fundamentally is a really messed up situation. You'll tell yourself it isn't that bad or that the next update will fix it or that you can get some magic software thingy that makes it go faster. Whatever.

Once you realize you are being abused, you can make some choices and do something about it. Most tools can be replaced if you look around a bit and do a bit of research. And virtual machines on Linux can run Windows just fine if you have one or two things that just really need it (been there done that). There's also wine and proton which aren't half bad these days. And they work for lots of things other than games. You can dual boot. Etc. Try it and find out. The absolute worst case is that you have to go back to being a lame abuse victim here. You'll feel extra bad because now you know. The best case gets you out of that abusive relation ship for the rest of your life. Life is too short to get subjected to this kind of abuse.

This might have some merit for some people.

But the talk of abuse is also heavy-handed.

I've spent months testing and trying out RAW photo editors, and months trying out Linux gaming.

Linux is incredible, but my experience with Windows is still better. As many that still use it can attest, you can disable almost any annoyance. It's extremely stable. Things just work including brightness controls, fractional scaling, high refresh rates and high FPS gaming, and my favorite RAW photo editing. I could switch to a less enjoyable experience with Linux but I choose not to after extensive evaluation. I don't spend any money on Microsoft services, no Office or OneDrive subscription.

But my decision isn't permanent. My hobbies, software use, gaming selection, etc. can change over time, and Linux is getting better while Windows is getting worse. If it's ever "abuse" and I can have a better experience with Linux, I won't hesitate to change. But it's also a lot of effort to try out alternatives, and dual booting is slow and annoying. Plus when I dual boot to Linux Mint the kernel fails to boot every other time and I have to select an older one, reboot, select a newer one, reboot. It's a huge waste of time. A bad experience and I have chosen to avoid it and try again in another year or two.