Maybe with desktops, but even just last year, trying to get wi-fi setup on my beagle bone or raspberry pi were hell. Multiple programs to do the same thing, and none of them work quite the same. So running scripts from the command line with the usual commands wouldn't work, so then the only thing that did work was the gui. But what if you don't want to use the gui, because you want the thing to reconnect automatically after power down (an option the gui didn't provide)?
Maybe running ubuntu, this wouldn't have been an issue, but beagle bone had archlinux, and then I tried multiple versions for the raspberry pi, most of them debian based.
So, no. This meme won't die just because most versions work out of box for desktops. It would have to work out of box for anything linux runs on.