More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".

If you are comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. setting up pre-installed Linux verses pre-installed Windows, or installing Linux to installing Windows), I would argue that Linux has been in the lead for many years. Setting up a reasonable desktop distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) is no more and no less technical. Linux distributions won't encourage you to create online accounts, try to upsell you online services, or bombard you with questions about privacy settings.

From my last experience with macOS: on a technical front, macOS is simpler to reinstall. The online account setup and upselling is far less intrusive (perhaps to the point where you can legitimately consider it as a beneficial setup step for the end user). Perhaps macOS has the lead, but it is a marginal one.

The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.

I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.

If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.