"Just use asio"? Had a borked driver cause blue screens on bootup for a piece of hardware, talking 5 digit price tag hardware... Same driver randomly doesn't present an Asio device.
Want to stick to "windows default audio engines" well, wasapi is what you should use now right? KS has the best latency ( wasapi should be calling that under the hood ), how about the other 3 options?
When it "just works" it's great. When it doesn't you cannot "dig in and find you need to go directly to ALSA(the KS alternative for linux)" because the driver you have loaded may not even present a KS interface, if your DAW even allows you to use something which isn't ASIO...
I have my faie share of pain with audio on windows, I wouldn't trade that pain for audio on linux granted but honestly, never had a single issue on macOS...
With both OS you eventually have problems and if you are willing to solve them you can put a lot of time and effort into doing so. The only difference is the openness of the system. With Linux, you can easily go much deeper (for many reasons: community, available source code, multiple implementations for different system components, custom kernels). But don't get me wrong: More options aren't necessarily better, because it can take a lot longer until you run out of options.
> In Windows or MacOS I would have been up and running immediately.
Over the years, I have thought so too sometimes, but every time that I tried, I had to tinker with Windows too (not necessarily to solve the same issue, but then something else)...