All decades have been rough decades, from modeline generation, to the switch to PulseAudio to Wayland. There is always a construction ground in desktop Linux. That's the sad story of the Linux desktop. It's really a hard problem to crack, it requires vast amounts of manpower, a lot of coordination between various parts of the ecosystem and it doesn't help that most hardware vendors are not cooperative. Go back ten or twenty years and you'll find exactly the same message as yours "it used to be bad, but most problems are solved now, really".

Desktop Linux will always be in a state where it is great for technical users who have the expertise and time to fix and work around things. Because once you've done so, it is infinitely malleable. It will always be a miserable experience for non-technical users or technical users who don't have the time to fix the issues. Linux on the desktop only really excels when one party polishes the experience to be great and makes all the bit work togerther. E.g. like Google did with Android and ChromeBooks or to some extend Red Hat with Fedora (which is the best and most consistent Linux desktop experience).

Outside the desktop, little software is as successful as Linux. It's the substrate of the modern tech world.