deregulating

Nope. Nope-nopety-nope, leave this american bullshit where it belongs.

You can get lucky, some of the aftermarket stuff works

What does Arch have to do with anything?

self explanatory

If you ever had to teach anyone anything, properly teach, you would know it’s a myth. It’s self-explanatory to you because you’re already familiar with the logic, language, conventions. I’m guessing, you grew up with all that from childhood, and you just forgot how you had to learn all that, and now you assume this knowledge didn’t need to be taught. You think cog is a universally understood language for settings because you always had it in front of you. Just like a lot of people think/thought that 3.5 floppy is a universally understood icon for “save”, and people who grow up now have no idea what I am talking about.
And then you assume that you are the average person, and start measuring everyone by this mark.
But if several years of teaching people of different skills, motivations, and ages, how to work with computers taught me anything, it’s that there is no universal language, there is no, and cannot be anything self-explanatory, and intuitive interface is a myth perpetuated by people who newer used anything other that one OS they grew up with. There is no amount of skeuomorphism you can employ that doesn’t require at least some amount of learning.
And when it comes to learning, let me tell you, there is nothing more straightforward to teach than “you type words and then read what the computer typed you back.”
And if several years of tech support taught me anything, it’s that if a regular person who doesn’t care about a computer encounters a problem, they don’t have inherently better time fixing it with GUI, never, not at all, not in a million years. I however always have way better time helping them, if it’s Linux and I can tell them what to type and they can read me the response. This actually true even if people are good with computers and know their OS.

neither accessible nor feasible for the average computer user.

Absolute hogwash. Learning like five short words is absolutely not unfeasible for any literate person, if a user can’t do that, you can be sure they aren’t actually an average user, they can’t do anything with gui either. And probably need help tying their shoes.
A two years old child can learn 5 short words. A grown up can write them on a sticky note and plop them on a screen.

It’s not either-or. You can install KDE on Arch with one button in the archinstall you mentioned, and it will be a GUI based distro, you can happily live moving your mouse around the coloured buttons if that’s your fancy.

I clicked one once by accident when trying to select it. You can be as diligent as you want you still will slip up from time to time

If the originals are too difficult to sink your teeth it, you can start with Xenonauts.

That’s the whole point, when you do useless shit like buying from one corpo instead of another, they only need to buy couple of politicians to succeed. The only way for you to combat it is to elect politicians they can’t buy and apply political pressure to the rest of them, so they can’t buy them all. If instead of that you play their game and try to outbuy a corpo that owns half of your country already, not only you will lose every time, you are actually what doing exactly they want you to do.
“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is about this, not anything else.

Voting with the wallet is mostly bullshit, it’s a myth corpos are telling people so we regulate them less. They have so much power to inject themselves into human’s lives, make themselves part of your existence. You can for example try to walletvote Microsoft out of your life whatever the fuck you want, while you were trying it, they bought a politician or twelve, and now they’re part of your government, your education system, your military, and your finance sector.
While democracy still exists, the only way to fight corpos is the governmental power or regulations.

Companies that do anti-consumer practices shouldn’t think it’s the norm. The more we fuck Apple, the less other companies think that it’s OK to fuck consumers.

Yeah, the way Google doesn’t make a Linux version of their product is indeed bad. They say it’s because they want us all using their web version, and it would be probably even a valid excuse, but they make their soft for Windows, but not for Linux for some reason.
Thankfully they are in minority, and you can just ditch them and use different, more user-friendly clouds. Or, as you mentioned, cool working tools that community made for free, since Google is apparently incapable.
Edit: back to the previous point, you managed to do it first time without help, which kind of confirms my point. There is a Russian proverb “while the eyes are afraid, the hands are already at work”, which is very apt here.

None of that is code.
It’s possible that when you ask for help you don’t even use the words correctly, like you demonstrated here, so you expect people to help you without doing a bare minimum of even understanding the terms. If this is true, it’s on you.
So many times I saw people comming hot, asking for help, and when given a command to run, getting angry that it’s some words they don’t understand, and asking for a different solution, one that doesn’t require commands.
I don’t know, for example, what problem you had that required you to “understand filesystem” whatever you mean by that, and if so, what solution to it you expected.

In the 15 years of me using Linux as my main system both for work and for fun, I have never experienced this situation. Never. I seriously don’t know what you guys doing that not only requires you to type 30 lines of commands - insane amount of commands, you can setup a complicated server from scratch with this amount if commands - that can also be accomplished with two clicks.
Give me at least couple of examples, I’m very curious

If you’re getting coding advice, you might be on the wrong forums, which can explain the snark.
You don’t need to do code to use Linux. You can use Bash if you want, but it’s not a necessity

The things I am talking about are applied to the development process before you start writing code. Rules from NASA’s the power of 10, MISRA, ISO-26262, DO-178C, and so on, as well as the general experience and understanding of the data flow or memory management. Stuff like that you fundamentally can’t apply to a system that takes random pieces of text from the Internet and puts it into a string until it looks like something.

There is an enormous gray zone between so called good code (which might actually not exist), and bad code that doesn’t work and has obvious problems from the beginning. That’s the most dangerous part of it, when your code looks like something that can pass your “Turing test”, that’s where the most insidious parts get introduced, and since you completely removed that planning part and all the written in blood rules it introduced, and you eliminated experience element, you basically have to treat all the code as the most malicious parts of it, and since it’s impossible, you just dropped your standards to the ground.

It’s like pouring sugar into concrete. When there is a lot of it, it’s obvious and concrete will never set. When there is just enough of it, it will, but structurally it will be undetectably weaker, and you have no idea when it will crack.

I have Aftershokz, and for what they are, they’re better than most of the in ear buds I tried. Better quality, cleaner sound.

I mean, there are a lot of projects that were supported by like one guy that stopped updating it 10 years ago, that’s true. But more often than not, if the software is useful enough, there will be a modern fork of it, or someone rebuilt it from scratch, or the functionality was repeated by some later project, or at the very least it’s very easy to patch some modern dependencies, and there is a very easily googlable helpful instruction on that.
Personally, I know of only two big products for which this isn’t the case, and they require 20 years old kernel to run, but those are esoteric outliers, and I’m not even sure people are still using it.

It’s a curse of the tech world. There are always some bullshit problems, there is always the need for tuning, tinkering, and generally fucking around with your system. No matter the OS, you will encounter some non-trivial problem at some point, that’s just the price of complexity. At least Linux is made for that and is opensource.

People you described don’t have better or worse time with different types of user interfaces, it’s all incomprehensible to them. Average Joe with zero skills can’t check boxes in some weird menus, just as they can’t write text in a weird black box. We’re talking about people who are at least a little curious about their OS.