This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?
> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.
I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.
None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).
The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.