Hey, first of all welcome. Now, I've never used Fedora, but I wanted to give you some answers to your points:

• Computer feels slightly slower. I'm surprised by this.

I'm also surprised by this, KDE is very snappy so it shouldn't feel like that. I have a gut feeling from this and some other things that you might have an Nvidia card, if so which driver are you using? I know the community shits on the proprietary drivers (with reason) but they provide the best experience (except when they don't).

• Fedora or Mint..."it just works" isn't exactly true based on my experience. "Most stuff mostly works okay" is more like it.

That's true, but that's also true for Windows. One thing we forget is the amount of knowledge we have acquired from years of just using the system. To me, every time I have to use Windows it's a chore, nothing works out of the box, everything needs some tweaks, I can't do anything, everything is complicated obtuse and weird. But to you it's not, because you're used to it, and since most stuff works and the ones that don't you are familiar with troubleshooting it feels as if everything works. I feel the same thing happens to us on the Linux side, we say everything works because to us it does (but also you've had some issues I have never experienced before).

• I had a service keep crashing upon boot: xwaylandvideobridge.

That is apparently needed to share your screen on certain apps like Discord. From what I read there are reports of people saying this crashes for them and it has to do with them running out of VRAM (which would also account for your computer feeling slower). And apparently there's a bug in newer Nvidia drivers where there's a memory leak that could cause this. If you're using Nvidia proprietary drivers check the version z maybe trying to update to the latest or downgrade to 550 or before it fixes this.

• Boot time is definitely slower compared to Win11.

This is because Windows hasn't powered off in a while, it hibernates. Even when you ask it to power off it doesn't, this is a known pain point for Linux because Windows doesn't close NTFS drives properly unless it powers off completely, so you are locked out of your shared drives.

I never tried to use systemd-analyze, but my guess would be that they're counting the time from when the service starts until it's done, and most of that time is waiting for hardware or other services, so if you have one service that takes 11 second and 5 services that take 0.1 seconds but depends on your first service they would all say 11 seconds. If you send me the output I can try to read the docs and see what I can come up with, a quick look told me that you can also run systemd-analyze critical-chain <unit> to get a dependency list which might give you more insight on all those that took 11 seconds.

• Weird stuff with youtube / video codecs.

Never had that issue, never heard of Cisco codecs either. You're correct that this is not newbie friendly, it's related to why GPU drivers are an issue in some distros. Apparently from the link that you send that is a description on how to switch from an open source implementation to one that depends on the proprietary Nvidia drivers. This is the sort of thing your distro should do automatically when you switch to a proprietary drivers for the GPU, and why I like to recommend certain distros that (at least back when I started) took care to do these things when you selected the proprietary driver.

HP printer

Yeah, all of my printers have been HP, the most I had to do was install a package for HP (hplip I think it was called) and they have all worked flawlessly.