They do, if that's what it takes to keep the qualities that make Linux different. If it turns itself into a shitty Windows clone, then one might as well use the original.
No, on the desktop, they absolutely do not. It may please a tiny subset of people who understand what the kernel is and read patch notes, but no one else.
It works fine for members of my family and extended family that have Ubuntu installs on Intel GPUs. Light gaming and more importantly, hardware accelerated YouTube works just fine.
I'd be willing to bet that most people really only want windows to appear quickly, scrolling in web pages to work well, and to watch videos online.
Lots of casual gaming has moved to mobile, and never left the consoles. Hardcore gaming -- not most people.
I used to think like you too. But spending around 3 to 4 hours a month (that's being very modest) trying to fix video tearing, hibernation issues, wifi issues etc. after every kernel release is a pain that I won't endure for long.
Wow, you got really unlucky. I'm on Debian Unstable yet I spend less than that per year. Are you sure you just didn't happen to hit upon a particularly badly supported hardware configuration?
In any case, why are you updating the kernel version every month?
Well, I use the mainline since I would like to start contributing sometime later. Also, I have a custom bootloader set up that managed to integrate nicely with Secure Boot, VMWare modules have to be recompiled with almost every kernel update since it breaks the Virtual device monitor and I had to write a script to automate that patching process.
Video tearing has been a constant problem if you use any type of compositer like Compton or the one that comes with XFCE or GNOME. I tried it on various systems and the tearing is there. A lot of people don't seem to mind though. For some reason, the Ubuntu maintainers don't think my hardware (or rather all laptops) should have the capability to hibernate to disk so they disable the /sys/disk (Im not sure I got the correct filename) which enables suspend to disk (this is one of the reasons why I need to use mainline anyway). PulseAudio doesn't play nice with DACs, ALSA is a pain to set up.
I really like Linux (so much that I keep 'ricing' my system) but these are the kinds of things that I'd rather not spend my time on.
That sounds like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. The open source drivers are a bit buggy. The binary drivers work just fine on Linux. Their performance in games is lower compared to Windows, but that is the case on OSX too.