I find your comment interesting as I have heard many people prefer Linux GUI because of its "responsiveness" and bloatless GUI.
As @556fmjoe said - it depends a bit on what you mean by "GUI" - which is all a bit pick-n-mix on Linux.
There's at least two 'display servers' - that handle the basic graphics rendering, "naked" windows and I/O - in circulation: X.Org and Weyland (I think XFree86, the original, is pretty dead). Then, on top of that, you have the "window manager" layer, which handles how you open, close, move, resize windows, then sort-of-joined-at-the-hip with that you have the "desktop" systems (Gnome, KDE, Mate etc.) which combine the window manager with all the trappings of a complete desktop environment - widget libraries, application frameworks etc. usually up to and including file managers, system configuration utilities and even common apps like media players or web browsers (...although the latter are now mostly Mozilla or Chromium variants). Then, you (or a distro creator) can take all that and start playing pick'n'mix with it.
...have I offered you enough "choice" to leave any hope of "it just works" far behind yet? Of course, its all vastly more customisable than anything Mac or Windows can offer... if you know the right configuration file to edit and what line of hieroglyphics to enter (both of which vary with disro and version).
There are ultra-light-weight "window managers" such as xfce - which can be quite bloat-free and responsive and are particularly brilliant for old/underpowered hardware - but are rather spartan compared with Mac or Windows - then there are behemoths such as KDE and Gnome which tend to be the opposite of bloat-free (and depending on what apps you use, you can easily end up with the libraries/frameworks for both on your system).
I've mentioned issues with multi-monitors and 4k scaling (there probably exists a combination of distro, display server, driver and window manager for which it works - but 150% scaling, pretty much the goldilocks zone for 27"4k displays, is still 'experimental - here be dragons' in the latest Ubuntu, for example and you'll need to google for the magic invocation to enable it).
Also, I find that things like hourglasses, visual indications of when you launch an application etc. are lacking especially compared with MacOS.
Then, if you want to use the GUI interface to configure your system... Well, the answer used to be: forget it, ignore the GUI, find the appropriate text file in /etc, edit it and 9 times out of 10 the comments in the file will tell you what to do, just back up the file first, or leave the original line as a comment - and frankly that was a far better way of handling all but the most trivial of config changes. Now we have systemd - which potentially is a far more effective way of letting point-and-drool GUI apps configure the system... and one day, when the Gnome and KDE folk have written point-and-drool GUI apps that work for anything but the most trivial of configurations, it may be brilliant. For the moment, gone (or, more often, still there but ignored) are the old familiar /etc/whatever.conf files and instead its editing an obscure JSON file (bletch!) and/or issuing a "systemctl" command that is friendly and obvious in the same way that "unlight lamp" was friendly and obvious in 1980s text adventures...
I'm not exactly knocking Linux - I use and like it - but I prefer to keep it on the end of a command line where it is happiest and use Mac/PC for my "visual computing"...