It's sadly not as easy as you make it sound. I was recommended to use Ubuntu for my work laptop because the IT team couldn't guarantee support if you used another distro. I know my way around and particularly love Manjaro (and worked with Debian and SUSE and Mint) but the company uses proprietary VPN and a spy/monitoring agent and I wasn't sure I'll be able to make those work on a non-Ubuntu machine.

So yes, there could be huge sunk costs. After fighting with this work laptop for a full work day to get every single step of the onboarding completed, I am not looking forward to doing it again -- even less so if the proprietary and mandatory programs that I have to install can't be guaranteed to work on anything outside Ubuntu.