Eh, on something as customizable as Linux where the solution to problems can often be "run this line in the terminal", I do believe that a new user can mess up their configuration. I remember Linus from LTT having to deal with a few problems while doing the challenge.

It's certainly also the fact that everything you need is already there out of the box, no need for tinkering to get the GPU drivers installed.

The two things are probably both true

Two editions, the current one and previous one, I believe

And the space hog is like a few gigabytes. I think that's well worth it for a beginner when it means that in the worst case you can always roll back when we have like terabytes of space