AI is pretty unique as far as technological innovation goes because of how it interacts with labour markets.
Most labour-saving technologies increase the productivity of labour, increasing its value, which generally makes ordinary people a little better off, for a time at least.
AI is different because instead of enhancing human labour, it competes with it, driving down the value of labour. This makes workers worse off.
This problem is of course unique to an economic system where workers must sell their labour to others.
Tech sovereignty is one of the main 'practical' reasons why the pivot to FOSS is happening in the EU at the moment. I think this would be the strongest incentive, especially with the US increasingly being a less reliable geopolitical partner of the EU.
I don't think this is the whole picture. AI-generated code is harder to maintain because the creator may not understand how/why it works, and AI is are notoriously bad at debugging it's own code. Using a lot of AI generated code often counterintuitively slows down the overall development process
This definitely can't hurt and will probably help narrow it down, but it's unlikely that OPs problem is hardware-related given that it doesn't happen on Windows.
And his attitude toward distros is that he wants one he can completely ignore