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I'm going to date myself here, but when I was in high school in the late '90s, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and helped me get it set up. He gave me the distro he used at the time: Debian. He explained to me how Debian, unlike other distros, compiles everything it installs, which is why it takes so long. I recall him explaining that this would make things run better in some way (but I was a teenager and don't remember too clearly). The install took hours. Many hours. I don't remember what kind of computer I had, it was a Pentium something.
There was such a sort of romance and intrigue to Linux back then. It was so challenging to get working, the desktop environments were janky AF, getting some drivers working was like a day's work. I miss it, though.
A long time ago, streamlining linux for your computer did avoid all the fuss with modules installation, that would fail often. Also, a long time ago Debian didn't have many optimized kernels for you to pick, so compiling it for your CPU in particular made a lot of difference.
None of that is true today.