If they ask for help to setup their phones someone more technical, so I do not see a problem.
How do you define sideloading then? Also preinstalled Play Store and Google services is the exact reason why they are asked for an email address, something I wish should not be by default.
But okey, just preinstalled store would not be a problem for me as long as everything is available to remove, even with a warn sigh. I don’t want to evangelise here, but on Linux installs it’s awesome how not only browser and store is preinstalled, but also useful stuff like file sharing client, FTP client, office suite, email client… depends on the distro, but it makes it easy to ask “hey, can you share it to me?” or do something without asking to install anything new, while all can be removed with no marks left.