I agree with this, even though I don't think I'd go back to Ubuntu. Mint is also a solid "it just works" choice for the most part and Cinnamon has been an easier DE for people to grasp coming from Windows in my experience.

Nobara is my choice out of the smaller distros. GE recently got SELinux switched out for Apparmor and the next iso release should have the Calamares installer instead of Anaconda. Both should help quite a bit for new users

One exception, from experience: when you have a bleeding-edge gaming hardware.

After months of unsuccessful attempts to make Ubuntu use the hardware properly (incl. following GitHub threads closely), I gave Manjaro a shot and it worked on the very same day (this included switching to the experimental linux kernel). I'll very likely revert back to a Debian-based distro at some point though.