I recently decided to learn modern macOS after avoiding it my whole life.
The UI isn’t horrible, but I found that I needed to buy about 20 different apps to regain basic OS functionality. Naturally some of these apps will charge me if I want to use them on the next version of macOS as well - honestly their whole app ecosystem feels like a scam.
I bought more apps than I would recommend to anyone just for the sake of testing and learning them. That being said, assuming someone doesn’t know their way around zsh/bash, can’t figure out homebrew, or doesn’t know how to use GitHub, they are probably going to have a bad time (although weirdly my tech illiterate friends like vanilla… am I crazy, or is window snapping extremely efficient?).