You can tune any distro to any degree you want and replace everything including a custom built kernel to get performance. But you know not everyone can/wants to do that, I have a toddler so I'm not going to take a whatever Debian and install a new scheduler and whatever just cause.

You might forget that Linux desktop is growing super fast and fiddling with stuff under the hood is not that common and noobs and people with experience end up fucking things up constantly. Having something that's performant, optimised for your use case, whatever optimisations baked in won't break with updates and you can just install it and forget is a really big deal. This is just not something that was available.

I think you should stop the hate and allow people to be happy with the distro they like for whatever reason.