Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.
But I always take some time to look if somebody succeed in installing Linux on the laptop I want to buy before. If it means I need to wait an extra 6 months, then I wait a bit.
All the builtin radios, cameras, microphones, and sensors in modern laptops make them ideal for stealing your private data. I already have an untrusted cell phone, I want my personal laptop to be something I can feel comfortable keeping my data on. Because I can't personally audit every chip, that means I need some level of trust, and Lenovo has demonstrated over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted.
i don't care what they put on the default windows partition (i replace it on arrival) and the uefi issue was a production mistake where they imaged with a nonproduction image.
they're still used widely by serious people in academia, open source and security sensitive industry.
i suspect a lot of the bad press they get comes from the fact that there's a lot of very sharp eyes making use of their gear and that similar issues happen in other lines but just go unnoticed.
if you're truly paranoid, a pine arm machine or fully open source risc-v may be your jam. everything else is going to be loaded up with proprietary blobs everywhere along with overcomplicated supply chains and overzealous marketing departments cross selling adware onto that default image you should be tossing anyway.