>Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice

That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.

Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.

Not at all. I've used Linux on Thinkpads starting in roughly 2006 (switching away from MacOS), and they always worked flawlessly.

One major FU was with the 5.x kernel when suddenly it no longer supported my external monitor, this with Intel graphics (and one by one all distros upgraded to that kernel). Not sure what happened there and why, but I had to do using Linux for a while because of that.