Fonts are likely a matter of taste. I personally can't stand how they look on Windows, to the point where I had difficulties reading off one of my monitor (and none of the cleartype settings helped). Having quite different font rendering on multiple screens is something that highly annoys me.
As for hardware, I was probably lucky, and use a nice DELL laptop from my lab. Sleep doesn't work on my Ryzen desktop, which I don't know how to debug, though it's only a minor annoyance.
The general reason I use Linux (aside from philosophical/ethical considerations) is to get my system as lean or as bloated as I want, but always exactly know what happens on it, how parts fit together and be able to diagnose and fix a problem is one arises.
But the battery and sleep issues aren’t close. On Windows I get probably double the battery, maybe more. With Linux I had to hard reset out of sleep on a regular basis, never mind if I had it connected to a monitor.
Again I really want it to work. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. Maybe next year I’ll try again. But in reality I’ll prob just get a new MacBook, it’s really the best of all worlds imho.
I don't buy specifically for Linux because I'm willing to deal with the incompatibilities, but in my experience battery life can be at least comparable, and sleep/wake/Bluetooth are fine out of the box on all of my machines. Worst problem I had was my Lenovo P51 and its Nvidia Optimus setup + docking, but that actually was also kind of tricky in Windows, so I can't complain too much (and it improved over time.)
Font rendering is the only thing there that you probably want to tweak regardless. For me, I just prefer disabling hinting and subpixel rendering, for blurry-but-accurate rendering.
And if you did ever want to switch to Linux as a primary OS, you can base your hardware purchases around it, which while isn't strictly necessary (I know I don't) but certainly helps a lot if you just want stuff to work out of the box.