As much as I fucking cant stand him, I have to say.. in that case, Most new users would do exactly what he did.

Computer users always get hit with big ominous warning messages that amount to nothing 99.9% of the time. IIRC the reason something happened that time wasnt because Linus ignored the warning message, but because of a known bug in that version of the distro that was known about and wasnt fixed in the installer for months, until the video came out, that caused the DE to be removed when uninstalling something else.. Which is just pants on head and should have been fixed long before the video came out.

Besides, and I say this as a non-technical non-sysadmin linux user.. the overwhelming amount of tech support for linux doesnt encourage knowing what commands do, it encourages copy and pasting.. because almost all the tech support solutions I've ever found basically amount to "if you have X problem, copy Y command into terminal to fix it" with no explanation on why it works, just that it (hopefully) does.