>When people say Linux just works fine for them I genuinely think like am I crazy or cursed or something?

People who do that generally don't use Gnome, but i3/swaywm/xmonad and multitude of tools where you're in control what happens.

Linux works fine for me, but I don’t use a desktop. I totally agree with you that they are disasters, with poor documentation and multiple conflicting ways to make settings.

Firefox crashing is probably a Firefox problem.

You can set the scaling to be anything you want on X, just set the Xft.dpi number in your .Xresources file.

One problem with your Hackintosh install is that it’s closed source, no? As far as you know it’s exfiltrating your financial information to China.