> but anyone in between is going to be doing a LOT of pasting incantations they don't understand into terminal windows.

This thinking is really obsolete and couching everything as grandma or graybeards is really ageist, anyway. Last I looked, you have to do this on Mac more often than I'd like. On Windows, it's open up CMD as administrator and paste this command or download and install this little app and run it (that does God knows what as administrator).

As someone who doesn't own a Windows machine and only uses Macs for work, this feels like an outdated perspective. It's been many years since using desktop Linux has required magical terminal incantations (for me at least). If it says Nvidia, don't touch it. Otherwise, everything seems to just work, and things at least don't get broken arbitrarily by companies whose goals don't match mine. Even all the games I've tried have run solidly with Steam's Proton support.

Maybe I've become numb to them, but I just don't see these painful interactions that get referenced, and don't see why their bogeyman would be worth giving up your freedom to use your machine.

I'm a retired software developer. I have my computer and my non-techie wife's computer running Linux Mint. For me, doing some hobby coding, yes, I paste some incantations, but for her, I don't have to do anything. A clean install just works fine as is.

Ironically modern Linux is trying to alienate the grey beards with uneditable config files, breaking decades of convention, etc.

Only those that never used UNIX commercial clones, which have deviated from System V long time ago.

What?

Systemd, netplan, and many other things.

I am not sure what UNIX clones have to do with this

The latest version of Ubuntu you can not even set the IP with standard etc config, you have to use netplan YAML configuration

systemd has replaced all kinds of things with non "grey beard" configurations,

the list is pretty extensive

Solaris and AIX had systemd like features eons ago.

OS X configuration files (plists) can be XML based or binary, many are binary and managed via plist CLI or app.