Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.

Probably Manjaro or Ubuntu.

And in my experience, nothing “just works”.

I am okay if some edge case needs tinkering. As long as every day common use cases just works. There is no distro that even meets that?

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PopOS and Mint for instance are all fine, stable and just work great out of the box

The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.