Man, we really need to make "The Church Cathedral and the Bazaar" required reading.

You clearly have missed the entire point of Linux, which is the freedom to do with your machine as you like. The endless number of choices for specific tastes is the result of people having the choice to write their own thing.

When consolidation happens, when people say "make my choice for me, I can't make decisions" we end up with super constrained setups like MacOS, Windows 11 and stupid Gnome the way it is now; no choice, do it our way or not at all.

And the answer is still freedom. It's obvious in the plugins and addons for gnome that get it to do basic customizing you find in, say xfce as a toggle in the settings. You find it in the myriad of softwares written for windows and mac that let the user do what they want to do.

And I will likely not be the first to point out to you Linux doesn't "aim for desktops", linux isn't an organization the way ms and apple are. And it likely never will be.

Newbies will be scared and confused no matter what's in front of them.

Why do I feel like narrowing down the options would not be that bad?

Perhaps because you miss Microsoft or Apple? In a rather misdirected way?

Half the point is there are multiple ways to do things - and mind, Windows is like that too (you can get to some settings though the new Control Panel, the old Control Panel, the Regedit, the Powershell...). Just about the only thing in Windows you are forced only one vision of is the desktop itself, but as soon as you double-click an icon, all bets are off.

Also if what you want is getting behind "tried and tested, universally accepted technologies"... that's what sysvinit, ALSA, X11 and automake / build-essentials; no need for systemd, Pulseaudio, Wayland and Snaps. Pulseaudio was basically a stillborn deformed baby whereas I've never seen ALSA fail since 2002 (to the point even today I have to "fix" Flatpak not having audio on Pipewire unless Pulseaudio sits behind it by just seating both of them behind ALSA). I don't even have to begin on Wayland, it started as just vaporware; Systemd is largely an attempt to microsoft-ize Linux system management; and Snaps make me want to snap.

As for newbies... others have addressed the point but honestly, if someone gets scared and whiny at the "choose your starter" screen of the game, they're not gonna last any in a Pokémon game nor would I want them around whining about things they couldn't even be bothered to be here for.