I've found that it's pretty good at this point for the inlaw/grandma crowd that mostly just checks email and Facebook. As long as you (someone that isn't them) installs and configures it for them. Pop is my current recommendation and it's working well for a few people I've setup. My grandmother ran Ubuntu for close to the last decade of her life, I only had to update now and then, and I setup WINE for the two games she wanted installed.
This isn't too much different from how a lot of people use Windows and Mac, many wil have their kids figure out how to setup an application for them. It depends, of course. A lot of professional apps just don't have suitable equivalents for Linux and WINE doesn't do it for them.
I'll put it this way, my non technical friend is tried of Windows.
She doesn't play video games or need much space. An M2 MacBook Air is 800$. If anything goes wrong, just take it to the Apple store. Even out of warranty if it's something simple like you broke a setting, they'll fix it for you.
It'll be much easier to just buy a Mac. I personally don't want to buy a new Mac because I want to have a 4 TB SSD and to get that in a MacBook you have to spend between 3k and 4k. Vs being able to upgrade a cheaper Windows laptop for 200$.
I personally dual boot Linux Mint and Windows. Linux is much better for getting things done.
Networking is one thing that can get especially weird. And command line might not work... You have too many ways of doing same thing and they kinda work together until they do not and then well nothing saves you apart from cleaning up everything and starting again...
It hasn't been like this for a very long time, but "You need to compile the kernel in order to get it to play sound" is still an incredibly effective attack because it puts advocates on their heels trying to defend it as baseline usable.
When you think about its main competition it's a little silly to keep framing it this way, but again, it's extremely effective so it doesn't really matter if it's right.
Kernels too sometimes stop working. Am currently testing latest stable (caveat with some patches). Nothing major has changed as far as I can tell from my sources but the newest release (6.9.9) now has an unexplainable panic on boot.
Eventually things get weird, you have to drop into the command line to sort it out.
Normal people have other interests, they don't want to invest 4 hours into figuring out what why their Bluetooth isn't working.
The vast majority of folks won't even want to install a new OS.