Author appears to be complaining (among many other things) that attempting to retrofit machines that came pre-installed with Windows to run GNU/Linux doesn't work well, and... It never has. Not once. I can name zero experiences in my lifetime doing that where it was relatively painless. I perceive this to be not a "machines aren't flexible" problem, but a "machines come out of the factory with ten thousand complex configurations tuned to work correctly with each other, and when you rip out a piece as large as 'the operating system,' half those configurations are now tuned wrong (and the OS was holding another half of them)" problem.
On this ThinkPad, the only time I've run into issues is when I switched out the window manager. Turns out, the WM's configuration is implicitly tied to a half-dozen features (audio selection power management, etc.) that don't "just keep working" if you replace it. Should I be blaming Ubuntu for that, or should I accept that some pieces of the OS are big enough to be disruptive if you swap them out?
Nobody is optimizing for the "get some hardware and retrofit an entirely new OS into it" use case; that way will forever be a gravel-strewn road. If you want a smooth road, get the OS you want from the factory.