It’s not about being unable to face choices, it’s that if you make beginners make choices about things they don’t yet understand, they won’t be able to make an informed decision, and they will feel overwhelmed.
I don’t understand why people don’t just recommend vanilla Ubuntu. It’s popular, it’s easy, pretty much every Linux Desktop troubleshooting article is written in the Context of Ubuntu. There’s only one flavor of it, so you don’t even have to learn what a Desktop Environment is until you’re ready to get there.
If you want more Linux users, you need to lower the barriers to entry. If you gatekeep Linux by demanding that people already understand things like the differences between different DEs before they’ve even installed the OS for the first time, you can expect that people will keep using Windows.
Microsoft spends billions of marketing dollars pushing Windows. Linux doesn’t have a marketing department, that’s up to the community. We can’t be marketing Linux as harder to use while Microsoft markets Windows as easier to use, not unless our goal is to boost Microsoft’s profits.