It’s really sad that all that work went into Collections and then they failed to really teach and push people the (sometimes) benefits of a collection instance over linked mesh data. There’s still things about collections that aren’t finished or need to be added and it makes no sense that you can’t instance an individual object (with all of its modifiers) on an Empty just like you can instance a collection.
If they had lead with object instancing a whole bunch of people using alt+d would have moved over to that for most cases and then could have dabbled with using collection instances for some other needs as well.