You can spend 2 hours writing commands in a terminal just to change a wallpaper, but no one actually does that unless they really want to. As you've discovered, instead you can do it more easily than in Windows through the graphical interface.

There are a lot of Linux memes based on how Linux worked in the 1990s. In the '90s, Linux was less than 10 years old. In addition to KDE, Gnome, and some of the other big desktop managers, there were a lot of small, experimental window and desktop managers, most of which were half baked. I don't think there was ever one where changing the wallpaper took two hours. Maybe 30 seconds to a minute, if you had to open multiple terminals so you could read and then type out a long filename. Most of those window/desktop managers no longer exist, and those that do are much more fully featured now, and more importantly, this was already the case in the early 2000s. When I started using Linux in 2001 or 2002, the most incomplete desktop it came with (Red Hat 8 or 9) was Enlightenment, which was pretty bare bones but was still fully usable (and you could change the background image pretty easily). Enlightenment still exists today, and it's actually my favorite Linux desktop, but it as awesome as it is, it lagged behind options like KDE, Gnome, and even XFCE, LXDE, and OpenBox enough that you won't find it in most modern distros. If you want it, you have to download the source code and build it yourself. I have done this (around 2018 or 2019), and it's not super hard, but Enlightenment still wasn't terribly stable. It's certainly usable, but I has problems just often enough that I eventually had to go back to LXDE. I do intend on trying it again, but it seems it just never reached the critical mass required to get enough devs to make it production ready. (That said, I do use Terminology, the terminal program from Enlightenment. It's both stable and pretty awesome! That one is in the Debian repositories.)

Linux has become something of a kicking boy for those who have unreasonable loyalty to some other OS, especially Windows but also Mac. Because Linux was developed publicly rather than behind closed doors, it is fairly well known what it was like before it became a more mature desktop OS. The result is that when some Mac or Windows worshipper wants to throw shade to make their favorite OS look better by comparison, they'll take some aspect of ancient Linux that made it difficult to use (though to be fair, most computer users back during early Linux had to use the command line now and then even in Windows, so it wasn't that different/more difficult), and then make a meme that massive exaggerates it. And as often as not, it something that wasn't actually ever a problem or difficulty for Linux. I've seen memes about having to reinstall Linux or Windows every year to avoid stability problems, and while that was kind of true for Windows 95 and ME (but not 98 so much), it was never true of Linux. Where that idea actually comes from is early Macs! Early Macs, mainly the late 1980s and early 1990s Macs, had some issue with the OS that would slowly make it less and less stable. Macs were the first computers that crashed often enough for people to care about it. I don't know exactly what the problem was that caused this, but my aunt and other people I knew who owned Mac during that era told my parents (when I was listening in) multiple times that if they didn't essentially completely reinstall or factory reset (I don't know the details of how it actually worked) at least once a year, it would start crashing so often and running so slow that it wasn't usable. That has never been a problem for Linux, and Windows 95 and ME did tend to accumulate a lot of cruft, but they typically lasted at least 2 or 3 years before needing that. (I wonder if the problem was hard drive fragmentation. I don't think early Macs had any utility for fixing that, but late DOS and early Windows-OS (Windows 95 and later, prior windows weren't operating systems so much as window managers/desktops on top of DOS) both had defrag programs and included instructions and recommendations for using them in the manuals they came with. Windows ME did have serious stability problems as well, but I don't recall them getting significantly worse with time, if you regularly defragged.)