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Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It's not bad by any means, but it's a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn't come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I ran Fedora 33, and upgraded it in place through to fedora 36. Ran pretty well the whole time.
I had snapper running for btrfs snapshotting, and did a double hop release jump to 38. Somehow I messed up my high water mark config for snapper in the mean time, and ran out of disk space mid-install without realizing. Symptom was firefox crashing. So I rebooted. Borked.
I agree with all of your complaints about it, and there’s plenty to dislike, but it’s still probably a good landing point for new users.
For me, it was the right amount of itjust.works at the right time, coming from debian (an update in 2018 killed my gdm, and I rage switched to fedora). Next stop is Gentoo!
The third party thing is outdated, you can enable it at install and have access to flathub and fusion repo. So installing Steam or Nvidia drivers is dead simple now. I would still say it's not great for new users because it's ultra minimal.
Nobara fixes quite a few aspects of this.
I really don't understand why backup tools like Timeshift or Snapper aren't shipping preinstalled & preconfigured in all mainstream type distros when you go with btrfs, or at least have an option in the installer for that.