There’s nothing outrageously infuriating with Cntrl
+Enter
causing a page break to same page style. That’s indeed the intended purpose.
In LO Writer, workflow is based on ubiquitous styles. There are many more style categories then in M$ Word. You must get accustomed to them and teir interactions to benefit from Writer power.
When you design a document, you first think about its logical parts: cover, TOC, dedication, chapters, annexes, indexes, bibliography, … Each part will receive its own page styles (I use plural here because each part may in its turn be divided into first page, even and odd pages with small differences in layout).
Switching from one part to the next is best triggered by using a specific paragraph style forcing a break to the desired page style, so that you don’t need to enter a manual page break. For example, Heading 1 can be set to active the first page of a chapter. Of course there cases where a manual page break is necessary, but it is very common that this extra break does not imply in change of document part. I personally find that that present default of keeping the current page style is handy because you keep the same header and footer.
The common counterexample is insertion of a landscape page in a portrait flow (and vice versa). Here a manual edit is necessary and again defaulting to Default Style would be of no help.
To minimise manual edition, you must carefully organise your paragraph styles, paying special attention to your page breaks. Note also that page styles allow you to define a follow-on page style which takes effect as soon as a page has filled up, minimising again the need of manual page switches.
Remember that LO Writer is not M$ Word. Workflows are different and you must first learn the basic principles to master the application. You must forget some of your “intuitions” to the light of the underlying principles. Migrating from one application to another is never free. After some time, you may find that some Word design decisions are not that reasonable viz. typographic art.
Unbalance and learning are the price to pay but this is not wasted time.