Thanks for the detailed explanation, makes a lot of sense! I guess what I did was set up a UEFI entry that specifies the location of the Linux kernel without any intermediate bootloader. Pretty sure I didn’t set the fallback, so I’m guessing that’s still owned by windows.
Seems cool, but it’s currently missing some pretty important languages (Hindi, Urdu, Thai, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Swahili, etc). I’d put up with something limited like this if it was FOSS and/or selfhostable but it appears not to be