Cool and Good aren't the same thing.
Some of the best people I've ever met were pretty low key and definitelly weren't overly concerned with presenting an appealing image to others.
What's percieved as coolness usually is just dressing the part and acting the part and in my experience "cool people" are often people who just take the whole maintaining a public persona thing to quite extreme levels, pretty much playing a role as if life was a Theatre play.
This being a weekly columnist in The Guardian, a newspaper whose journalists are almost all upper middle class people who went to very expensive private schools (curiously callled "Public Schools" in the UK because theoretically anybody can send their children to one, if they can afford it) as are the editors and the board - so they're almost all from roughly the top 11% of the UK population wealthwise - I expect that her real problem with these present day overlords is that they're neither posh nor English.
If they had the kind of "proper" manners, soft discourse, cultivated look of detachment and posh dress sense that are taught at the "right" schools, they would be alright.
You don't see this kind of critique there against posh English super-rich (especially not "old money"), even though they're just as sociopath as Elon and Zuckerberg.
Yeah, I have a similar situation with Borderlands 2 not running on my machine with Windows 7 but running just fine in Linux with Proton (which is Steam's branch of Wine).
It seems to me that Linux with Wine is actually better at backwards compatibility for Windows applications than Windows itself.
PS: Also a handful of old games I have from GoG that wouldn't run on Windows run just fine with Wine on Linux.
I bet the canadian pilots ending every single radio communication with "thank you, over" must be tiresome for the American control tower operators...
In all fairness, their 9/11 attack was massivelly successful in getting the US into a spiral of increasing authoritarianism and propaganda which in turn accelerated the pillaging of the wealth of must of its population that really took off in the time of Reagan: basically people so easilly accepted massive levels of surveillance and complete total subversion via things such as anti-Terrorism legislation of the balance of Rule Of Law, that the elites just started squeezing people more and faster with total confidence that people wouldn't rebel or be able to do anything about it.
I mean, Neoliberalism would always naturally end up in a new Gilded Age only worse, but the rush away from fundamental elements of Democracy (you know, not to be under surveillance by a Stasi-like structure or be treated as a terrorist because of being a member of an Environmentalist group) - which in turn resulted in situations as we see now with UHC and Luigi and the vey open "in service of the 0.01%" behaviour of the Ju$tice System and the Press - was anchored on using 9/11 as an excuse.
It's funny that without actually spotting the mistake I just read it as the op expecting multiple criticisms to and basically telling people bringing them to get in line.
It eliminates the dependency of specific distributions problem and, maybe more importantly, it solves the dependency of specific distribution versions problem (i.e. working fine now but might not work at all later in the very same distribution because some libraries are missing or default configuration is different).
For example, one of the games I have in my GOG library is over 10 years old and has a native Linux binary, which won't work in a modern Debian-based distro by default because some of the libraries it requires aren't installed (meanwhile, the Windows binary will work just fine with Wine). It would be kinda deluded to expect the devs would keep on updating the Linux native distro (or even the Windows one) for over a decade, whilst if it had been released as a Docker app, that would not be a problem.
So yeah, stuff like Docker does have a reasonable justification when it comes to isolating from some external dependencies which the application devs have no control over, especially when it comes to future-proofing your app: the Docker API itself needs to remain backwards compatible, but there is no requirement that the Linux distros are backwards compatible (something which would be much harder to guarantee).
Mind you, Docker and similar is a bit of a hack to solve a systemic (cultural even) problem in software development which is that devs don't really do proper dependency management and just throw in everything and the kitchen sink in terms of external libraries (which then depend on external libraries which in turn depend on more external libraries) into the simplest of apps, but that's a broader software development culture problem and most of present day developers only ever learned the "find some library that does what you need and add it to the list of dependencies of your build tool" way of programming.
I would love it if we solved what's essentially the core Technical Architecture problem of in present day software development practices, but I have no idea how we can do so, hence the "hack" of things like Docker of pretty much including the whole runtime environment (funnilly enough, a variant of the old way of having your apps build statically with every dependency) to work around it.
I don't have that design posted anywhere. Here's the circuit diagram in image format: 
I don't use Arduino boards but rather the microcontroller chips directly, which turns out to be pretty simple to do (here's some videos on doing Arduino stuff that way).
Because I'm using discrete components (mostly DIP so that they can go into a perfboard but also some cheap SMD MOSFETs because low power SMD MOSFETs go for 2 cents each and work fine for just driving a small water pump whilst all the DIP MOSFETs are power MOSFETS, so much more expensive and way over spec for the kind of currents a small water pump pulls) so it all adds up to very little cost, plus I made a board design for it and had 20x of that done by some cheap chinese PCB maker so even the board ends up even cheaper than a perfboard.
Doing the whole thing around an Arduino board, even a cheap Arduino Micro is much more expensive, way over-spec for an automated watering device plus those boards tend to eat up lots of power when in sleep mode so the batteries wouldn't last long if the circuit was built around such a board - if you look at the diagram, all the paths from VCC to GND either go via the microcontroler (like how SIGNAL- and SIGNAL+ drive both sides of a two color bi-directional LED) or have a control MOSFET that blocks by default when the micro-controller doesn't send any signal (like SENS_CTRL).
The $3 bucks are a rough estimate but I wouldn't be surprised if it's an overestimate. It really depends on the price of the capacitive sensor you're using (I just get mine from Aliexpress) as that might actually be more expensive than the rest. However do note that the price of the water pump was not included and that adds maybe another 2 bucks.
EDIT: For some weird reason I kept mentioning "diode" when talking about MOSFET transistors, so I corrected that.
At home I use an "automated indoor plant care" device of my own making with about $3 of parts (including a capacitive sensor) plus a water pump on a jar full of water and some hose.
Because it uses an ATTiny45 (I had plans to move to a more modern microcontroller but couldn't be arsed) rather than an ESP32, it's not "internet enabled".
I specifically chose a microcontroller which only used about 2 micro Amperes in sleep mode and has a broad range of functional input voltage, so that it can run directly of 3x AAA batteries, which only have to be changed about every 10 months.
I would say that "doesn't need to be plugged to an external power source" and "batteries last ages" are probably more important requirements that "internet enable" for something whose only purpose is to automatically keep the humidity of a vase above a certain value and to me this Plant Bot just seems overengineered and trading important things for frills.
This kind of stuff is really just an Advanced Arduino project.
In my own personal experience, as a gamer and having switched my main machine at home to Pop!OS some months ago, it's more like "need Windows to run nearly 5% of games" thanks to Wine and Proton which work as adaption layers to let Windows programs (not just games) run in Linux.
(Curiously I use a lot more Wine with Lutris than Proton and Steam, so my success rate is even down to how far the main Wine project got, rather than any special juice that Steam might have added on their Proton branch of Wine - you don't really need Steam or Proton to run most games in Linux and the success rate for just running games from GoG or even pirated ones is just as good and from some games it's even the case that the Steam version won't run but a pirated version runs just fine, probably because it was the DRM that the pirates cracked that caused the problems).
Mind you, at least in my games collection only maybe 1 in 20 have native Linux versions (which is still better than 99% of games being Windows only), but because of adaption layers like Wine and Proton, for most games you can run the Windows version of it in Linux.
Absolutelly, in the old days it definitelly was the case that Windows was needed for nearly 99% of games (I should know: I've been trying to switch my gaming to Linux since the late 90s), but that's not at all the case anymore.
Your idea of how hard it is to game on Linux is at least 1 decade out of date.
I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.
Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.
That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you're hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.
Things are really bad nowadays unless you're a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you're home.
Since I'm an European, lived as an immigrant in the UK for over a decade and was a regular reader of The Guardian for most of that time and even for some time afterwards, your ad hominem missed the target by a huge distance.
Your post says a lot more about you given that you've jumped to such a conclusion about me from what you read and chose an ad hominem as "counter-argument" than it says about me.