I'd not buy a LG monitor

Distributing malware is negligent or malicious, yes. Not stopping users from seeking out their own malware is neither. Nothing stops you from running malware on Linux. The curated repos are simply good enough that there's not much reason to go looking elsewhere.

The fault here is definitely LG's, though.

If anything, as shitty as LG's behaviour is, Microsoft gave them the tools to eke out a little more money at the expense of the consumer, and a company like LG is not likely to leave that money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts. As the scorpion told the frog - "It's my character".

A display, of all things, shouldn't require installing anything to make it "just work." It just needs speak standardized protocols over standardized cables. That should require no more than generic drivers shipped with the operating system.

I'm starting to think that is what I need to do with my computers.

Meh, give a company something they can feasibly abuse for money, and they'll probably do that. I'm not sure that this is practically feasible on Mac or Linux; Macs enable fairly constrained but powerful userspace drivers that generally need approval, and I've never seen a piece of hardware automatically download anything that can run in the background, but that could be an anecdotal experience. Maybe printers would be the exception.

The tradeoff is that even software like Zoom doesn't completely work by default

The proposed solution to this huge issue in windows isn't to let average users fend for themselves, no one is arguing that.

Meanwhile, junk food, tobacco, alcohol and gambling corporations are always willing to fight tooth and nail to block attempts at advertising restriction and bans. Advertising in the long haul will always work, especially if it manages to stand out in noisy but bland environments.

As for the ones that we deem to be the most useless ads, perhaps they still serve an Overton Window purpose in maintaining a level of chaos and confusion along with keeping a marketing manager occupied with busywork (or ad fraud) until they have a real campaign to impress their boss with.

The fact that I still semi-regularly encounter "tech literate" people who refuse or are slow to learn to use uBlock Origin (or similar) says a lot about how accepting many people actually are when it comes to noise.

There are cheap dongles that spoof the EDID for a fixed 4K or HD monitor with fixed settings. Not sure what they do about DCC/CI, might just disconnect it.

Good for coding, good for reading documentation, good for writing, good for browsing. It's only bad for gaming and traditional widescreen videos, unless multitasking at something else below the video.

The display driver board has various inputs like HDMI, Thunderbolt, USB-C etc so it ends up acting like any other external monitor. It has a remote you control the brightness/contrast etc settings.

I've got my Mac and PS5 hooked up to it. Love it!