Ok, let's say I'm a tech savvy Windows user. Assuming I have something like Visual Studio installed, would this compile correctly off the bat? I doubt it. (I've not tried tbh)

Personal experience, most of the source I download from GitHub either will straight refuse to compile in Visual Studio, or requires me tweaking a lot of the dependencies and stepping through the warnings and errors until it does.

"Ah, but don't use Visual Studio" you say. "Use XYZ-compiler-de-jour". Right, that's now in the 'too-hard/too-time-consuming' bucket, and I'll look for something else.

Pretty easy if you have a reasonably fast PC (>8 cores, ideally HEDT/server), use one of the two popular platforms (Windows or Ubuntu) and don't try to outsmart the build system.