Is there a curated up-to-date list of reasons somewhere on the internet that explains to a naive end-user why he/she should pick a given distro?
I still recommend Xubuntu for new users since they can leverage the massive package base and stable releases of Ubuntu and move to something like Fedora (or Arch or whatever) later.
That said, I agree with what jononor said. Using something similar that what your most helpful Linux-using friend uses trumps picking the most ideal distro and as long as you pick something relatively mainstream there isn't going to be that big of a difference anyway. In my experience, the choice of desktop environment (GNOME / KDE / MATE / etc) is actually more impactful than the choice of distro.