The parent comment was on the right track, I think. The Linux desktop constantly sabotages itself, and things like the x11/Wayland rift, the Snap/Flatpak vs Native Packaging battle, and all of the new abstractions do not lend themselves well to usability. Pretty much every open source project has made this mistake at some point, but I think the most consistent party that works against it's community is GNOME. Not only do they ignore the feedback from their users (a problem so pathological it's a meme by now), but they don't ask for help when they make new changes. Inevitably, this leads to worse UI (like the GNOME 40+ dock, the worse GTK widgets, the ugliness that is Adwaita, etc.), which leads to Linux being seen as neckbeard software again.
If you enjoy Linux, I encourage you to use it; I use it too, and it's great for a lot of stuff. Everyone responsible for marketing Linux to a wider audience has failed though, and the effort to replace Windows with OSS is looking increasingly Sisyphean.
The end user doesn't have to know what X11 and Wayland are. You don't need to know this to use most software. Just use what your distro provides.
Most of the complexity you mention is hidden from the end user.
Which is why opiniated distributions exist, so that users get a coherent environment from people who made the choices for them.