It’s what proprietary software tends to target, so for someone just coming from Windows, it’s a decent first choice.

OpenSUSE/Fedora don’t support media codecs without knowing you need to add Packman/RPMFusion

Debian just released Bookworm, so it might be an okay recommendation for now, but as a general rule it’s probably not the best first distro

For someone used to Windows staying the same for years, jumping straight to a rolling release like Arch or its derivatives is a massive change

NixOS is too much configuration for a first time user

Linux Mint is maybe a better first recommendation, but it’s still downstream of Ubuntu (I wouldn’t recommend LMDE for a first time Linux user)

Your response is exactly why people find it so difficult to pick a distro to start. Ubuntu may not be the perfect distro for you or I, but there’s a decent reason it’s one of the biggest, and it has conservative defaults

Until that user knows what things bother them about it or what more they need, we’d just go back and forth all day about upsides and downsides of each distro