Note: I am not from the Pop team so this has nothing to do with them. I am just a user who wants shit to work and not distro hop every couple of months.
Not trying to invoke a distro war here, but I recently bought a second hand sys76 laptop. The build is ok not fantastic like thinkpads or macs, but i wanted to try out their distro - Pop OS. It runs pretty great, smooth and very snappy. I really like the best of both worlds - tiling vs floating windows.
That said, I see a lot of hate for this distro. Christ Tirus Tech posted multiple videos ditching this OS like it is garbage. Linus Tech Tips had that self owned moment when he installed Pop and crashed it, so not a good marketing for the OS.
I used Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch. Each has its pros and cons but the hostility is nowhere near the ones Pop gets. Did the devs fucked up because they did something stupid to the OS, like Manjaro team when they forgot to renew security certificates?
I dislike Pop!_OS because it just didn’t seem keyboard-friendly to navigate. I like enviros that at least try to cater somewhat to mouse-averse people like me who aren’t capable of jumping to 100% Terminal action. If I recall correctly, the animations/transitions were also less-impressive to the point of feeling cheap and unprofessional.