You're somewhat correct, the windows stack is by far more well maintained. But that's because it's all controlled by one entity. In Linux you have a large variety of projects with their own goals, their migrations, etc. In theory the way this gets resolved is with the distributions, who have to select which version of each software to deploy. The major problem is that this layer is actually very difficult to maintain because most distros have tens of thousands of packages.

If you want stable Linux, really debian is the go-to, they don't brother with most of the rigamarole and churn of software. Instead trying to put a solid image of a working system together. The problem with this is that software updates and features that many users want can often be delayed by years. And not just 1 or 2, but sometimes up to 5 or 6 years.

Really, projects like flatpack and snap is a great move forward, and I will suspect you'll only see this type of system take more of a roll. Since it breaks the linkage to system libraries, developers can more easily deploy their packages in a system agnostic way which takes a work load off of the system maintainers. And since applications will always have the version of libraries that they want, you don't have nearly as complex of a dependency graph. But this does have a problem where applications have to interface with hardware.

On windows, hardware actually does break more frequently than people believe. There's a reason why game developers always have to tell people to update their graphics drivers on windows. Many of these updates are handled in the background so users don't see it. But the real reason, is because hardware vendors do put a large effort to keep their hardware working on new machines.

While exes might work from all time, hardware is more hit and miss. Try getting some unique hardware from 1995 working on windows 11 and you're going to run into all sorts of issues.