Same. I started really using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and was drawn in by its "Linux for human beings" goals - the Ubuntu homepage of the era really pushed the ideals of community and openness. Canonical sat in the background paying to send you free CDs in the mail. It was such an idealistic thing back then.
And then it all changed around 2010. The color scheme shifted to a shitty MacOS lookalike, the human elements were dropped, the logo was reworked, it got bundled with a paid music store, then Amazon ads in the search, and it's been a roller coaster on a downward spiral ever since. I switched to Debian not long after the initial enshittification in the early 2010s and have not looked back, though I moved most of my systems to Arch a few years back because I like life in the fast rolling release lane and Debian wouldn't support my new GPUs.
Yeah, building a new PC without NVIDIA or at least swapping your GPU really is the best solution. The past two years I've run an Intel Arc A770 which was rough at first because the drivers were brand new but has been solid for over a year now and then in February or so I upgraded to an AMD Radeon RX 7800XT which has been absolutely amazing with my 4K 144Hz display. My setup before that was a 1080Ti and it was never an enjoyable experience on Linux and I usually gamed on Win10 on it. I haven't really touched Windows other than a small handful of times on the A770 or 7800XT as Linux runs great on them.