I feel like one could imagine some hypothetical Linux distro that works out of the box, has some baseline level of coherency and polish without you having to get your hands dirty, and also hasn’t been enshittified.

I have no idea what distro fits the bill the best, but surely it’s not like the only two options are: “be treated with no respect as the user” and “sink all of your time into into fixing things up”

Like how Linux Mint doesn’t force snaps on you like Ubuntu does. Probably not it, but one step of many in the right direction. Plain Debian is probably pretty close.

Zorin fits this bill, IMO. I install it for all kinds of non-tech folks and they all seem to be fine with it.