You're slightly missing the point. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to me, the end user, whose fault it is that my OS doesn't have codecs.
The problem is that when doing an extremely basic operation that works on every system I've used before, it doesn't work, and the most readily available advice on how to resolve the issue tells me to run commands. Regardless of the reasons why it is that way, it just simply isn't user friendly.
There are tradeoffs in life, not perfection. Bondage vs. convenience, your choice.
Having to install codecs once every few years is a tiny inconvenience compared to the dystopia offered elsewhere. I also run commands on Win and Mac all the time to fix things. For example Windows wastes tens of gigabytes of space unless you run a couple of inscrutable commands to free it.
Let me be clear, I am making only one very specific argument: Linux Mint is not as user friendly as people say. I'm not putting any blame on anyone for it not being user friendly, I am not saying that Mint must be a perfect OS replacement, I'm not saying that it makes Mint a bad OS, etc.. I'm only saying that it's not that user friendly, despite what many people say.
Yes, and I’m saying none of them are, though occasionally it’s luck of the draw. The genius bar exists for a reason, and not only for broken hardware. If you paid for a Linux expert to help it would be similarly easy.
Everyone has to balance how much pain they get on Windows from the restarts, slowness, updates, etc versus how much pain they get from occasionally having to run some command in terminal window. I get your points about there being rough edges - the good thing is that Linux is a very good system for fixing Linux issues. Everything is tailored for that :)
Learning the basics of linux can be very powerful and now with AIs you can get essentially anything done just by asking the AI to give you the right commands. Linux is friendlier to be fixed by AI suggestions, which I think will actually be the big difference this year.
And to be fair, I'm not a fan of Linux Mint. I much more prefer Debian or Fedora with clean GNOME.