These UX systems should be standard across all distros.

Anyone who expects Linux to be like MacOS where you basically only have 1 way to do anything- is going to be frustrated. The thing that you find annoying about Linux is the thing Linux users love about it.

The great thing about Linux is that almost nothing is guaranteed to be "standard across all distros". Different people have different use cases, needs, and preferences. If you take the time to figure out how to make Linux look and behave the way you want it to, it's has all the advantages of MacOS, but it's even better because you can fine tune everything to be exactly how you like it and not be stuck with whatever they give you.

I guarantee there is a way to get the exact functionality you are looking for in any Linux distro, in fact there are probably a half a dozen different ways or more to accomplish it, but it's more than likely a couple of toggles in the settings menu.

a need to install apps using terminal.

I installed Pop!_OS on my PC over a year ago and I haven't needed to open up a terminal window to do anything the entire time. I did install a newer version of the app store, but even that I did by using the old app store. I do open my terminal sometimes because I love learning different ways of doing things and understanding how my OS works, but it is by no means mandatory.

It's not the nightmare you describe but it might take a little adjusting to, just like with anything else. There are also many different distro's from very beginner friendly to building a custom OS from scratch. As long a you have the time and patience to do a little research, you could find a distro that would be perfect for your needs- or at the very least one that could be with minimal tweaking.

One mistake I see some people make is not starting out with a beginner friendly distro. They think they are too advanced for that so they go for something designed for people with more experience. There is nothing at all wrong with going with a 'beginner' distro. You can do anything you want to do on any distro if you know what you are doing.

It's not for everyone, some people don't care about customization or learning anything new or free and open source software, and that's fine. For everyone else there's *nix.

Whatever you go for, make sure drivers are up to date. Anything pulling directly from the Debian repos requires manual installation for Nvidia drivers later than v525.x.x.

Not that doing so is hard, its just tedious and tbh I don't expect the average new user to have a firm enough grasp of everything going on to handle it smoothly.

Mint is fine. Some people like Fedora, but its sluggish on some hardware. I'm a fan of my arch Based distributions personally, but I don't recommend pure arch to a newbie (endeavor maybe, but even then expect to do a ton of reading)

If you're looking for something to tinker and learn with, something more advanced might be good.

I usually recommend something that is immutable if you're looking for a set and forget system that won't require much (if any) tinkering.

In my house we use Arch, LMDE, and FreeBSD (do not recommend unless you prefer to live at a terminal)

Fedora is absolutely the better choice between those two. Much bigger community, more suited for desktop use in the first place (CentOS is more of a server OS), frequent updates, great starting point for modern hardware. You may also consider a modified one like Bazzite or Nobara if you have an nvidea GPU (because they have drivers built-in).