📚 Why does every major Linux Distro seem to have a massive asterisk attached for new Users?

It seems more and more people are considering Linux, in light of all the nonsense elsewhere. It seems a good time, too: Nvidia should finally start working decently well, features like HDR are getting real development, and proton support for games seems to work for almost everything that doesn't involve an invasive anticheat system. For average home users, Linux, collectively, seems to have reached a point where it has everything they need... but when I come to try to recommend a distro to these potential new users, instead of having one or two just solid, uncontroversial options I can hand them and be the end of it, I end up with a long list of "maybe this one, unless..."

When looking for a distro to recommend for the average, not-power-user Windows user, there's a few criteria I feel it should meet:
1. Work with their hardware, without being more complicated to set up than installing drivers on Windows is. Too complicated? They'll quit and go back to Windows. I've seen it happen several times.
2. Have easy access to the applications they want to use.
3. Have a large enough community that they can reasonably get support without being shamed for it, and can find tutorials that just work for their distro.
4. The distro maintainers are reasonably trustworthy. It's not a long list. But so many distros come close, and just... miss on something or other.

For instace:
- Linux Mint is super user friendly, has a great, large community, is Debian based and pretty much every app supports it. It is so, so close to being a perfect choice for new users, except, because it's on an older base, it might not work for people running the latest hardware, meaning you have to specifically check if their hardware will be supported. And, because it doesn't have any options for Wayland, a user who, for instance, just bought a fancy new 144hz monitor and want to use it alongside their old 60hz monitor need not apply.
- Ubuntu has long been the recommendation for new users. Massive community, your pick of any DE you want, and support is even provided by a company, which a lot of people prefer... except, its insistence on Snaps has eroded trust led to some questionable decisions, like cutting off flatpak support and thus making it harder to use the best supported version of a lot of common linux apps. This can be fixed, but the act of doing so is generally more work than a lot of new users are willing to put up with, and there isn't the trust there that more changes won't come along later and make it worse.
- Pop!_OS, despite the name, seems poised to pick up the slack from Ubuntu. Maybe fewer DE options, but in theory Cosmic should be pretty great, except, due to all the focus on building Cosmic, the available version of Pop!_OS is pretty old, and runs into the same hardware support issues mentioned for Mint. Cosmic is supposed to fix all this, and early indications are great, but it isn't there yet, meaning it's not really a recommendation for people who want to use Linux on their new computer now.
- Fedora seems like it's in a great position: cutting edge support for new things, but without pushing into the bleeding edge. Quick access to new features, but (usually) not beta-access. Big company behind them but with enough community control you shouldn't have to worry about them going all Microsoft on you, and RPMs are the second most widely available packaging format companies use for professional software, behind .debs. It would be a great choice for gamers, except, for a lot of common user tasks, like, say, watching youtube videos without issues, you have to add a third party repo. Multimedia Codecs and a whole lot of software are locked behind RPM Fusion, which, while great after being set up, is intimidating as hell to new users, and I've lost several people back to windows because they tried Fedora and something or other went wrong with their attempt to get multimedia codecs working.
- Arch, perhaps, could be a good option. You get the new stuff, it's constantly becoming easier for new users, and it's got a huge community and a massive wiki that's so well maintained and detailed I use it to learn stuff about other distros than Arch. Companies don't generally package directly for arch, but damn near everything is in the AUR. It seems like a good option for a distro for people across the experience spectrum, except it's reputation is intimidating as hell. Most people I've talked to aren't even willing to consider it, and for those that do, it's bleeding edge, and folks tend to run into more problems than they do on the other options. It's getting friendlier, but it's still not all that friendly. It helps that when people just reply "rtfm" that the manual is as good as it is, but said manual is also huge and overwhelming and too much for a lot of new users, and the attitude that leads to that answer doesn't exactly make folks feel welcome. The AUR also comes with a list of caveats, is less trustworthy than getting things directly from the companies, and when a user runs into a situation where the simple app they want to install has a dependency that, while not big itself, by default compiles from source and that source seems to require some ~42gb of space and several hours to compile (which is an actual thing I've personally run into), it's going to frustrate the hell out of a lot of new users.
- Manjaro, then, exists specifically to be a user friendly form of arch. It should be better for new users, except, well... I'm sure folks around here have heard about the long list of problems associated with it, and the maintainers haven't exactly proven themselves trustworthy. It does seem to work for a lot of people, sure, but only until it doesn't. And I've had friends quit Linux because they ran into something on Manjaro that just decided to stop working. Even ignoring the management problems, it's not consistent enough for me to feel safe recommending it, and the AUR problems do still exist.

I'm sure there are smaller distros that fix the problems with these larger ones. I am, for instance, using Nobara myself, but, while Nobara does a very nice job of fixing the problems with Fedora, it does come with its own set: namely, an update process that can and has broken if people use the OS default update methods (dnf, Discovery, Gnome Software, etc.), and 90% of the support information comes from Discord, which, while the community is great, Discord isn't really a substitute for support... and I keep running into that stuff with the smaller options: great for specific use cases, but with an asterisk next to a general, low-effort user use case.

But that's the thing: these problems are all distro-specific, not Linux-specific. We could have that easy-to-recommend option! We almost do! So where is it? Why can't we find it? Is it just that the people who already tend to be using Linux, and especially those who are willing to put in the effort to maintain a distro, have things we care more about than user-friendliness? I'll admit, if this theoretical perfect Distro existed, I probably wouldn't be using it... but gosh darn it I still want it to exist.

No, I'm not asking for people to throw lists of recommendations at me; so far, I've been able to find something to recommend to my friends' specific needs and get them going (it's usually Mint). Any and all of these can work for specific people, so long as that asterisk isn't a problem for them. I'm also not here to say that you're wrong for using the distro you do; like I said, I'm using one I wouldn't personally recommend to new people... that there are so many distros for so many use cases is a strength of Linux, and a lot of the good things about distros are more impactful than the small problems. I guess I'm... more just expressing my frustration with the situation and wondering what we could do, systemically, to fix this sort of thing.