From a political science perspective (and for most people outside the USA), most of the US has liberalist ideology, including Republican voters. The electoral system is called a liberal democracy. The country rallying cry is for "freedom"; liberty.
US mass media simply started calling progressive liberalism "liberalism", conservative liberalism "conservativism", and classical liberalism "libertarianism". It's silly and confusing, but it's the world we're in right now.
To answer the main title question: it definitely can get better, especially if you're using common hardware with maintainers working to improve the code to handle them.
I'm one of the people with a mostly smooth Linux experience on my devices (I have similar values to other nerdy programmers and naturally purchase more similar or popular computers/parts, and I haven't really had brand new bleeding-edge computer parts, so that might give me better odds at a smoother experience), no weird audio/WiFi/GPU issues that you often see here. The only issues I have are so inconsequential they're not worth mentioning. And I've used the two OSs you've used.
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
Good correction, and I definitely didn't mean to suggest those programmers were unskilled. In their case, and like you said, the maintainability issues were often a result of technical limitations.
Absolutely. Nazis are consistently creatively bankrupt with few exceptions.
Original party aesthetics: rebranded from DAP to NSDAP (against Hitler's wishes) and adopted symbols to try and capitalize on the growing socialist movement after the failed German Revolution.
Original party policies: A shallow syncretic mess. Even Mussolini thought they were morons.
Neo-Nazi tactics: Also a syncretic mess, with tactics that contradict their own goals and abilities (e.g. copying black bloc, trying to adapt ex-military 1930s tactics to 2000s alienated teenagers).
Aesthetics (both original and modern): Ignorant copypasting of ancient imagery (not-actually-Roman 'roman salute', neo-Roman architecture and statues, fake-Germanic runes)
Nazi Pepe/Wojak edits: Both memes were already prominent from /r9k/ board.
Fashwave: Vaporwave aesthetics copied without understanding what they represent and why they were interesting
why do we keep letting them steal?
Stealing is easy to do and takes effort to combat. There are things we've stopped them from co-opting, and plenty of contested symbols. But at the end of the day, when the mainstream media picks up a symbol and repeatedly assigns it to a group, it's not so easy to overcome that in broader society.
By itself? No. The original character was not political, the community that made "feels bad man" famous as a meme wasn't political, and many, many, many of the variants still around split off before it was seen as political. Even in the political sphere, there are plenty of left-wing variants too which I would not consider hate speech. A frogpost without context will make me examine someone closer for other clues, but it's not inherently political or hateful.
I linked Specific Suggestions in another reply, which includes plenty of modern examples.