Do you think your opinion is representative of the majority of folks who use technology?

Of course not, but I see that fact as an indicator of the collateral damage in the continued "War on General Computing" more than anything else. The customer is not always right - what they may want is to be infantilized, but what they need is to be educated.

I've been witness to this "War on General Computing", being a 31 year old human who's used computers for the better part of 28-29 years of that time.

I'm not convinced the shift you're describing as far as UX writing is anywhere near as concerning as the actual war on general computing with respect to running the OS you want, the software you want, with restrictions as necessary for security but not for vendor lock-in.

UX writing tone, of course, is only a tiny piece of the overall foreclosure of customization that the current era of UX designers is complicit in. I see a continuum between cutesy UX writing and reduced ability to customize any and all settings by the end user; You think there is an "actual war" separate from the propaganda used to manufacture consent for it. Gilded cages need gilt - that gold leaf takes the form of emojis etc.

I've long thought that it would be really great to have log/internals viewing be a first class citizen of an OS.

Windows has a variety of tools that let you see debug message and trace events but they're not really useful for casual perusal. I don't know what the ecosystem looks like on Linux.

I suppose I'm not sure what I'm asking for. But in the aforementioned example (Window's post update/install OOBE with "We are just finishing some things for you") it would be nice to press something like Shift+F11 and open up a log viewer that knows you're interested in the main thing on screen to see what it's actually doing.

Linux is quite nice actually, getting a broad overview of "what the system is doing" is as easy as opening a text file or running a command. If you have a single app misbehaving, you can often run it from a terminal to see extra debugging information. (This trick usually works on Mac OS as well)

Windows has no such equivalent; event viewer is incredibly clunky