And then said aforementioned "hacks" do not get updated and you're in a world of hurt. Either legacy compatibility hurt or frozen API and potentially runtime hurt. Additionally vastly delayed updates including security.

Especially painful hacks are graphics and WiFi drivers.

The trouble of course is that people do not go to complain to, say, Nvidia that their GPU does not work, but to the distribution maintainers or kernel developers who have no control over the driver.