Windows is also pretty unpolished, I think it is impossible to get people to work on polishing unless you have infinity dollars, like Apple. At least Linux has the excuse that it is a community project -- things that the community decides not to work on are sort of definitionally not annoying enough to be worth working on, or they would.
I disagree. On my laptop running Windows 11, the edges of context menus are horribly pixelated because of the round corners they've added. Maybe there's a setting to fix that but I shouldn't need to look for that after I hit the "update to Windows 11" button.
This is something GNOME does better for God's sake and they can't even show thumbnails in a file picker!
I'd say Windows is selectively polished. Some parts are worked out beautifully while others are hacked together. macOS is a lot better in terms of polish (but a lot worse in many other aspects).
The whole "3 different settings UIs, one from each era of Windows, in Windows 10" thing, despite being a bit over-played, seems a bit unpolished. Maybe the plumbing is really polished, I just don't muck around with that in Windows.
