You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.
That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.
I don’t mind the kernel doing kernel things. The issue is system services and other software that are either unnecessary or badly coded. You can’t disable them because of “reasons” and they’re just wasting your time and your electricity.
That depends on the distro / flavor of kernel; the Linux kernel is pretty flexible and you can cut it however you want. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.