How is what you’re describing different to what the author is talking about? Isn’t it essentially the same as “AI do this thing for me”, “no not like that”, “ok that’s better”? The trouble the author describes, ie the solution being difficult to change, or having no confidence that it can be safely changed, is still the same.

R has the same problems as far as I’m aware, though it doesn’t form the core of a lot of modern CI of course!

Mint is honestly your best bet. I installed it for my parents on their aging laptop and they’re allergic to the terminal and they’re getting on great with it. Requiring a password for administrative actions is generally a good thing for security but you could disable it (unfortunately the only way I know how is via the terminal!). I’m biased here because I’m a techy person but I’ve used Windows, macOS and Linux professionally for years and I always have to troubleshoot things. Windows, in my experience, has always been worse than the others because while Linux has very technical or terminal-based solutions a lot of the time, Windows official support generally tells you to “just reinstall or restore from a system restore point” which is such overkill for most problems. That or registry edits.

I booked a flight recently, the translation engine was obviously having issues so instead of giving helpful labels for form fields it was stuff like: “{{ name.first }}”, which I could figure out for the most part, but then on submission I got an error with no description at all. I opened the dev tools and resubmitted the form to find the API response which gave me the actual error. 2 pages previously a form field hadn’t been set correctly by the web page (it was a drop-down, I selected an option, the error said it was null). I managed to force the field to populate properly and hey presto, submission works. Ridiculous.