I've never had this bad of an experience with linux, and certainly not now.
I've found this is distro dependent. I'm happily using devuan, an even-more-conservative variant of debian, and it's rock solid.
I had to fix a few hardware-related things and manually switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. It's been fine for almost a year since I did that.
I've reliably had the hole-plugging problem over the last 5 years with Manjaro + Ubuntu LTS.
It's definitely been really, really bad in the past even with major distributions. So, the comical description is not far off.
Do you use it on a laptop?
Because I think that's where most of the pain points lie.
I haven't used anything but Linux on a laptop in over a decade, and for me it really does "just work" (unless you're including one-and-done BIOS setup issues and the like).
It really depends the kind of laptops. Gaming laptops with nvidua gpus and exotic stuff? maybe. Business laptops with intel everything from integrated graphics to lan/wifi are usually painless. That has been my experience on Fedora in the last 15 years.
Caveat being to do some research before purchase about support of third party devices like printers or scanner.
I've daily drove Linux on various laptops and haven't had much issues in the last decade. Most of these laptops have been Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU.
It's more like a cartoon character plugging holes in a boat with their fingers and toes and running out of digits - they're trying not to drown.
Of course the alternatives are even worse, Apple, Microsoft and Google's "super trawlers" busily sucking the life out of the ocean itself.