How did this idea that Fedora is a no-brainer beginner distro take hold?

Any distro that leaves it up to the user to install proprietary drivers and codecs via command line and then a chunk of additional software before anything can get done is not beginner friendly by today's standards.

I'm a fairly advanced user of gnu Linux distros at this point in my life. Fedora is no where close to straightforward for gaming. Bazzite is plug and play set and forget. Is it frustrating to deal with flatpaks and osm-tree instead of simply using a standard package manager? Sometimes, sure. But for an absolute beginner there really is no better option for gaming as a fresh convert from windows.

Audio problems and nvidia drivers can be an absolute nightmare on almost all major distros from Debian to Ubuntu, to fedora if you don't have an absurdly advanced grasp of the processes underlying.

Bazitte takes all of that out of the picture. It's absolutely not a meme distro. It's perfect for an average tech literate person.

I use arch btw, Debian, fedora, Pop, lubuntu, Ubuntu, and a half dozen other distros on a daily basis across a handful of devices. So I'm not daily driving Bazitte, but for gaming and general purpose computing there's no simpler distro imo and I'll die on that hill.