In a ship of theseus kind of way i guess you can turn almost anything into anything else :p

Are you bored? Did you just build a strawman version of your own community to argue about something that is trivially easy to answer for everyone in this community? I am seriously confused. I have never ever heard anyone say that you could turn any distro into any other. That is just obviously not true. And every single question on your bullet point list is equally easy to answer.

When people say that it doesn’t matter which distro you use what they obviously mean is that the desktop environment has the way more immediate and tangible impact on the user experience. So as long as the newcomer choses one of the many distros that have an intuitive installer (so obviously not Arch), are reasonably up to date, have a broad software package repository, and come with one of the major environments pre installed, it really does not matter that much.

this goes for literally everything. Someone might still experience it as obnoxious and intolerable. Me included

I am with you on generally trying to understand the reasons for a particular behavior. Does not always help with being annoyed by it though. Especially if they apply their world view to everyone else around them and start to judge you for enjoying work/life balance

well companies decide to go public for a reason

well valve does the whole gambling for children shit so they aren’t exactly saints. They are just the least shitty. Also it helps that they are still private so they don’t have to answer to investors. But still, the whole skin trading, steam market stuff isn’t great