plus, my first windows machine went through a botched windows update and got stuck in an encryption key doom loop. now matter how many times i entered the key, it won’t let me into the computer. had to take it to the shop (tbf it had a lot of other issues too). when i got a new one the first thing i did was turn off encryption

I'd argue the proper solution here is backup, as a hdd could die at anytime and leave you with approximately the same outcome. While encryption adds some overhead and increases the surface area for failure, it ultimately requires the same backup solution as anything else.