In other words, RTFM

Person I’m responding to said this was common in continental Europe

Wouldn’t this be blatantly in conflict with the EU cookie law? Like I’m not from Europe but my understanding was that it needs to be equally easy to accept or reject all cookies. Dark patterns aren’t allowed

So, it’s beginner friendly as long as someone helps you out with the installation after checking up on all the stuff you will need to run.

In other words, it’s not beginner-friendly

Debian is in many ways the “deep end”. A big part of its development philosophy is prioritizing their weirdly rigid definition of Free Software and making it hard to install anything that doesn’t fit that. I’m not saying it’s not a good distro, but IDK if it’s beginner friendly.

Precisely! The sponsors have to be aware that some subset of the audiences watching the sponsorees will skip ahead anyway. They can’t seriously believe that they are entitled to our attention.