It's nothing about learned helplessness, it's about what the average user experience is for new and inexperienced users. And terminal commands are just not new user friendly. If Linux ever wants to consider being true competition for a Windows replacement with the average user, it has to provide easy to use GUI options for most commands, and it needs to do all basic functionality without a terminal ever being needed.
Like @user224@lemmy.sdf.org posted elsewhere in the thread, KDE has a good GUI for an end user experience for this exact situation. It shows files are open from the device, and what has them open, in the same interface an end user would use to eject the drive.