You don’t need super low level control access for 99% of “daily” tasks. Even in game development environments, you don’t need any of that either… If you want that, get the enterprise edition.
So what? Telemetry harvesting has been going on since the dialup days. You think running ublock/adblock prevents you from being harvested? Nope… It helps some, but doesn’t eliminate it. So what difference does it make if Windows is doing it too? You almost can’t even run a phone now without consenting to a EULA/TOS; in which there are clauses pertaining to them having the right to harvest telemetry. Switch to a custom android build like Cyanogenmod? Ooops, now your carrier won’t let you connect because they don’t allow custom bootloaders… I’m pretty sure that if you dig deep enough, in Linux distro coding(like Ubuntu, Mint or Debian), there is plenty of data harvesting too.
You speak of cost, well I’d gladly pay for a copy of windows before dealing with the headache of having an OS that runs around 1% of the games/apps that I use. Most of the Linux software seems like it’s written by interns and is usually pretty inefficient.
No amount of hipsterism and non-conformism is going to make PC Linux gaming take off. This is a topic that has beaten to death, over several decades now, and nothing has changed; nor will it in the foreseeable future. Even Mac gaming is barely a thing; siting around 3% overall usage on Steam. Plus, developing for consoles is the way to go now. Why focus resources on making a game for PC, with almost limitless hardware configurations to optimize for, when the console version of it, that only has a few FIXED hardware configurations, will easily sell 5x as many copies? Now go one step further with that: knowing that it’s not as huge of a market, why waste time developing/porting for an OS that makes up less than 1% of that market? Let’s say a game(also has a Linux version) sells 70% : 30% console : pc, of that 30%, you’d take 0.8% of that and get 0.24% of overall sales. Now let’s say that company spent 3 years developing the game and grossed $10 million USD, that means that the Linux market would only account for $24k USD. That 24k/3years=8k per year. That wouldn’t even cover the salary of someone working for minimum wage… Let alone, pay for a minimum of ONE programmer to spend massive amounts of time optimizing it for Linux. I’m pretty sure you get my point…
PC gaming isn’t dead, per se, but it’s definitely had a large audience snatched away and the majority of the persistent online PC gaming player base has gravitated toward a handful of specific titles.