This is heavily influenced by choice of DE. Some of them really do have all their options well laid out in the system settings, but others rely entirely on config files. I have little experience with GNOME, but with KDE I was able to customize my experience very heavily using only the system settings by just playing around in the GUI. Meanwhile, on another machine running Hyprland, I have had to read a lot of documentation in order to customize it, but the available options are relatively more powerful than the KDE setup.

Neither of these methods are more right than the other, but one is absolutely more new-user friendly, assuming they do not want to simply accept the defaults.

This is harder than it first appears. Microsoft actually subsidizes vendors for selling machines with Windows installed. So these cheap laptops would actually be a bit more expensive without the Windows installation.