How can this macOS created hidden file appear in Spotlight?
It's not hidden, it's a regular file that Office creates when you open a document to indicate that the document is in use and locked, once you close Office the file is removed, except sometimes Office might not close correctly and leave these behind. They don't contain any data and can be deleted.
Me too. 3rd party apps. I find that strange as I have a brand new 14" MBP M1pro.
I don't think I've ever seen a beachball on my 14" except for very unoptimized software like Office 365 that will always beachball to no end on every one of my Macs because except for the MS Remote Desktop app, the MS apps are trash.
For me Monterey since the .4 release has been the most stable MacOS I ever had going back to Leopard. Even Snow Leopard which I thought were pretty good at the time I consider garbage now, looking back it's crazy that I found it acceptable to only get a kernel panic or hung Intel display driver once every 48 hours instead of once every 8-24 hours. Even my 2012 Mac still had to be rebooted every 2nd or 3rd day due to a non-responding Finder, crashed driver or some other software problem. It wasn't until one of the last Intel Macs (2020 MBP) with Catalina that MacOS would survive a full week (then the bad memory management and kernel_task and WindowServer memory leaks made a reboot necessary). Big Sur was the same and Monterey starting with 12.4 had a noticeably better memory management with the kernel_task leak finally fixed.
The 14" is the first Mac I haven't had to reboot in weeks without it crawling to a halt eventually. Although this is in part because I finally have 64GiB available, the Intel one was limited to 32GiB. No matter how bad the memory management is, it can't mess up that badly.
I originally come from a place where I would open a folder with about 1k small files that make up my video footage for a project, then having to somehow get that into an app without Finder beachballing for 20 minutes (quicklook would just refuse to even work on these, it would load forever or stop loading and just showing the filename as if the file type wasn't supported), and while I went through the footage I'd hit CTRL+S periodically because it was just a matter of time before the entire screen froze (audio would keep playing, ssh login was fine), and I'd have to reboot to get that Intel driver back on its feet. That was essentially my experience from 2007 through 2013/2014 before it got a bit better.
Using network storages (Samba) would eventually beachball the Finder indefinitely, and restarting Finder would result in Finder disappearing with an error message that an error occured opening Finder. Shutdown would then never complete and just hang at a beachball.
From where I come from, Monterey is the holy grail of MacOS stability and performance. These smaller "losing focus" and whatnot bugs are things I can really only laugh about, although some are indeed infuriating. When unlocking System Preferences panes, the cursor is always automatically in the password field even though I work with a non-admin account and need to fill out the username field first (it's empty). It's like nobody at Apple ever tested MacOS using a non-admin account. That's across half a dozen installations both Apple Silicon and Intel, so it's not like it's a rare bug, it's simply default behaviour.
tell me that Windows 10 or 11 isn't stable on those.
I agree, Windows has been extremely stable for many years of 10 now and even though the Windows 11 settings are a chaos and the taskbar seems like a step backwards, I prefer 11 over 10 now. It's equal in terms of speed and reliability to my 14" with Monterey in my opinion, although I do prefer the MacOS UI a lot.