Usually people recommend what they use and like. A majority of people is on ubuntu/mint. Hence, they recommend that. I don’t like apt and I’d never send someone in the debian world unless they want a server. But nowadays the package manager doesn’t matter too much anyway. You should use flatpaks first, and then distrobox, nix, or native (rpm). You won’t feel a real difference between major distros because you don’t interact with the underlying system too much.
Fedora is perfect for beginners. And especially atomic versions as you said are great for beginners. Atomic versions are not good for tinkerers, so if you send someone who wants to customize his experience heavily, he’s going to have a hard time on atomic versions as a beginner. A casual pc user who will edit docs and browse internet prpfits immensely from fedora and atomic version. Fedora has awesome defaults and a new user does not need to care about recent advances in linux because fedora implements them already. Especially ublue improves upon fedora’s ecosystem.