That’s pretty much what I do now. Choice paralysis is a thing, and Mint is solid for people to dip their toes. The exception I’ve made if it’s someone more techy to begin with, then I might recommend Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi as a starting point. But that’s only if it’s someone already into networking or Powershell scripting or similar.
Nay.
Provided the moderators on sh.itjust.works feel capable of dealing with any outright hate speech or harassment from that community, I think most of us are big enough people we can deal with hearing differing view points. If someone has a big enough problem with a single user or community, there is always a user-side block as well. My only reservation would be if the degree of spam/harassment is over taxing our community moderators. I recall how many of us in sh.itjust.works were offended when Beehaw defederated us – for the same sort of reasons (too much spam, too much harassment, the wrong kind of people, etc etc etc).