Linux is way easier to screw up because it gives you full freedom to do whatever you want. It is like riding a bicycle as opposed to sitting in a bus. Of course you can do a wheelie and fall, but would you rather be able to do a wheelie or sit in a generic seat.

It is an open source architecture but it doesn’t prevent the OEM from adding anything to it to prevent user from doing anything on it. They can add TPM, locked bootloader with fixed signing key stored on board. They can add microprocessor inaccessible to anyone but OEM. They can add spyware, malware. All this without any need for declaring it or need to make it open source.

The only change RISC V brings is there is no need to pay for a hardware architecture, benefitting the manufacturer. Rather than bringing freedom to the user.

Not necessarily

Had a kernel update which couldn’t read a specific HDD controller chip. Since then I always install LTS version along with regular just for booting up if the kernel upgrade fails.

Other than your PC or Mac spying on you, you are in no danger.