Don’t know why you are being downvoted- this is the exact reason I bought a Mac, can totally sympathize. I hear the dell and thinkpad have this problem solved from the driver point of view at least though.

It's false that you have to be a sysadmin to run Linux, and the users here know it perfectly well. There hasn't been a laptop (or desktop for that matter) I owned in the past ~8 years that hasn't worked flawlessly out of the box on the latest Ubuntu/Linux Mint (granted, with the exception of dedicated GPU drivers). And I got everything you mentioned: slick UX, good drivers, auto updates, fast boot on SSD. Granted, no integration with Google services, and I consider that a feature. I also have this little extra:

Owning my computer, as opposed to paying for it to be controlled by Our Benevolent Overlords.

I don't think this sort of bottom-up approach will make you happy, though. You never know what kind of technology you need tomorrow and whether your Chromebook allows you then to handle that. And fixing that then is not possible, not with a bit of sysadmin work.

> I don't want to be a sysadmin

Hence "run Debian on it". The whole reason to run a Linux distribution is that the maintainers do most the sysadmin work for you, and Debian maintainers are among the most skilled sysadmins you can find.

You have to keep your filesystems from being full, but apart from that things will Just Work as long as you stay within the Debian tooling.

Why is the definition of a computer suddenly dependent on whether or not you can "easily" install Linux or Windows on it?