For the "I'm scared of computers" crowd, isn't it still a bit hands-on to get proprietary codecs so you won't run into to problems watching things like YouTube?
Ubuntu even has an option to install these at install time
youtube specifically, no, because youtube will do vp9 fine. Other sites though, which use h264 will be a bit problematic. Still, you can install chrome for that crowd, and they'll be fine too. Alternatively, you can enable rpmfusion or other third party repos, which has become a bit easier (almost too easy unfortunately) in recent fedora releases. I'm personally not a big fan of this direction though because it blurs the lines between official good quality software, semi-official software that is mostly fine except for patent trolls, proprietary drivers, and random proprietary software delivered through flatpak/snap etc. Currently, all of these are almost enabled by default, or are just one click away.
YouTube is mostly VP9 (and now slowly getting into AV1). Firefox actually automatically downloads OpenH264 for all the other online video.
MP3 patents have expired, so distros are shipping MP3 codecs out of the box now.
Does not happen anymore if you go for a distro like Mint.
For that crowd one wonders why anyone is recommending any Linux distro instead of a tablet or a Chromebox or something.