As I’m sure you’ve gathered, this is a complex and nuanced discussion, but to me the biggest factors making Linux fast are:
Absence of telemetry/data collection monitoring your use of the device
Open source development model encouraging the entire world to contribute to make the Linux kernel better
There’s something to be said where a consistent 5% performance improvement in a filesystem or process scheduler would be taken as a huge win. How would you even manage finding or contributing such a change to something closed source like Windows 11? Academics write papers about the kernel’s performance and how it can be improved whereas I tend to think Microsoft takes more of a ‘good enough’ approach to such details.