I had the opposite experience with Windows (7 up to 10), every now and then I would have to reinstall it to get some random feature working, which made the system run smoothly for a while - which checks out, considering Windows' affinity for software rot.
Then again, I increasingly debloated it as time went on, which I'd assume contributes to its instability.
IP addresses ran out, IPv6 adds more addresses than we may need, ISPs decide to take away the user's ability to host servers (more or less (more less than more)) rather than upgrading the infrastructure
That's exactely what happened in my mind when I was getting started with Linux (kind of), although it's arguably a habit that comes from using Windows where people don't really think about OS users and permissions