You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
It's also a fucking system daemon that runs in the background. Avoid.
Flatpak is available on every distro.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.