But this also mean you are not consulted on some critical configuration choice and that you are left alone wondering what to do next.

Earliest Macintoshs in the 1990 launched a tutorial on first boot until you explicitly finished or skipped it. This was a wonderful experience as a kid and still warm my heart today thinking back of it.

Today's Mac only display "tips", "what's new" after first boot or major update because people are generally more computer literate. But (unless Liquid Glass changed that too) they never gave on this mantra that the OS should guide newcomers.

So yeah I think Linux distro have room to do better.