I would also have to argue, that X11 vs Wayland has less importance than one would think. A user with 2x 1080p screens would be fine with X11, unless different refresh rates.

And multiple refresh rates is increasingly common with how cheap high refresh monitors are now. Tons of people have a 144hz primary and 60hz secondary, for example. Or they have 4k screens and want good fractional scaling, which as far as I know is borderline nonexistent on X11 DEs.

And even if you don't want to use mint there, what would you really recommend for new people?

Fedora is very easy to set up at this point, codecs and Nvidia driver repos can be enabled at first startup and then installed from GNOME Software or KDE Discover at this point, without needing the terminal, so IMO it's perfectly fine to recommend to new users. It's not like Windows comes with Nvidia drivers preinstalled, either, so I don't feel like that's a big enough obstacle to be a problem.

I do agree Cachy is a bad option just because it's still basically just Arch, and as reliable as Arch is these days, it still is going to be way more likely to break than something non-rolling.

If Ubuntu shipped Flatpak alongside Snap and integrated them into the app center I would say that would be a great option, as well, but unfortunately it doesn't, and I feel like Flatpak is too large of a software base to require manually setting up and integrating for new users.

I also asked my best friend who is very not techy a few months ago. She said she would rather have something that updates when it is ready and doesn't care much about the newest software, as long as it works

That's my problem, though. I've run into plenty of situations where X11 causes me problems, and I'm not on any exotic hardware. Few year old AMD GPU, two 1440p monitors that are both 60hz, etc.

For example, I had issues with Cinnamon, where the compositor unredirection just didn't work no matter what I did, which made gaming functionally impossible, and I know other people who have had the same problem and never found a solution even after a ton of googling and messing with settings.

That alone disqualifies it from me recommending Mint or any other X11-only distro, frankly. On Fedora I get Wayland DEs, and thus never have to worry about the compositor deciding it's going to ruin my day, which is how it should be.

either Cinnamon nor Mint were made to push the newest technology

And that's fine if they want it to be that way, but it does mean that I'm not going to recommend it to 99% of people, because most of the people I know do want the modern conveniences that come with modern DEs and distros that keep more up to date.

From personal testing I also have to say, that Cinnamon Wayland works better than Xfce and LXQT Wayland

It currently can't even get to the desktop on my system, on either Fedora or Mint, and last time it could a lot of programs and the desktop were very buggy, so I guess I've just got the short end of the stick, but it's definitely not anywhere near usable yet in my case

I hope it is for 23, I would love if Mint was a realistic option for me and that I could recommend to others, but it just isn't at the moment, I feel like it's stuck in an awkward spot because the bigger distros and DEs are so well made and moving so quickly these days.