I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu to any new users now.

Same. I also have a hard time recommending Mint as an alternative because of major hardware support problems the last time I tried to test drive it (which was a few weeks ago). I always come back to Fedora, but OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also wonderful, and I'd happily recommend either to newcomers. I did try CachyOS recently and stuck with it for a couple weeks, but recently went back to Fedora because of the constant AUR security issues.

I refer most new users to Bazzite if they just want to game and do normal things. For more technical users, I recommend flipping a coin over Fedora or Tumbleweed. Flatpak is the great uniting force in Linux right now, and I wish more developers would directly support it since community versions make me uncomfortable unless I thoroughly review them first, and I really don't enjoy that. The prevalence of Ubuntu-first packages is a major problem as Ubuntu rapidly enshittifies while Fedora and Arch communities are left to pick up the slack themselves. Pure Debian is fine, but release cycles are far too slow for my tastes.