That is actually deliberate, we tend to organize everyday life and the devices we build around processes that are easy to model, that is why many things look like linear processes and harmonic oscillators (the first two term of the Taylor expansion of the actual behavior). We change the type of spring we use if the current one starts to wear out early under normal operational conditions.

I think it’s more that we developed linear algebra that made us approximate physical processes by linear models. If you look close enough, almost nothing is linear.

For example, we happily draw a linear scale on a mercury thermometer, even though we know that not to be correct, even if we incorrectly assume that the coefficient of expansion of mercury is independent of its temperature. Also, try explaining why the conversions between Celsius, Fahrenheit and Kelvin are all linear (answer for Kelvin and Celsius: they technically only are since 2019, when we redefined them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...). I think the Fahrenheit scale was redefined as a shift on the Kelvin one around the same time)