I've only seen Windows and Mac options at work other than rare devops / sys admins who are using like red hat in some cases. Is there a generally agreed upon standard distro?

A lot of random programs that seem to be needed for corporate work, like outlook and teams, I imagine don't work or are somehow even worse on linux. Or is that what people are referring to with the junk software?

Does the general dev stack really run significantly more performant on linux distros? Significant as in uses 50% of the resources, compared to a 5% performance increase.

Windows drivers are relatively so optimized, I've seen battery life double when switching from Ubuntu to Windows on laptops although I haven't tested it in a while. The constant random headaches with webcams / mics / mice not working as expected has basically been my deal breaker in the past. Mac has been a decent medium.