Perhaps with a focus on the audience (e.g. a web dev distro), it becomes viable to make sensible compromises on both (easiness & simplicity) that result in a good combination for the user.
Pop_os! is coming from the other direction, but I found I prefer using i3/sway instead as I had trouble configuring certain things about pop.
Only reason I've seen to use anything else is if doing a full desktop installation doesn't make sense, as the installer is largely geared around just installing most everything, or perhaps leaving out a category or two. Beyond that, the documentation is clear, and it's made as easy to use as makes sense without just hiding things behind a black box so that when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong.
Nice to see some of these newer distros like Arch and Ubuntu are coming along though; choice is good.
You either have automation to make things easy to the user, but then it's no longer simple.
Or you require the user to do everything manually, but then it's no longer easy.