I suspect many new users get confused by the fact that lots of Nvidia hardware works poorly out of the box, rather than not at all, where the latter would at least provide a clue that a non-inbox driver might solve the problem.

To clarify, the Mint/X11 issue isn't that. I had the Nvidia drivers. X11 had some issue with graphics switching. It worked fine on Wayland.

They kinda need a basic working driver just to make it easy to install the good driver.