Well yes but also no. There are quite a few distros that are "minimal effort", they just work for the average person without any more knowledge you'd need on Windows or Mac. The last part that's still not so "minimal effort" is gaming, most things just work out of the box, some things don't. Btw Android is Linux.
So I don't think that the problem is that Linux needs a little more knowledge or effort, because it mostly doesn't, but the fact that most people who would switch see a billion different distros and don't know what to do. Having so much choice here actually hinders people from coming to Linux. Doesn't mean it would be better with less choices, it's just one of several reasons why we don't see mass adoption.
Another reason is the outdated thinking that Linux is complicated to use (and this blog fuels just that).
Programmers can double their productivity and increase quality of code?!? If AI can do that for you, you're not a programmer, you're writing some HTML.
We tried AI a lot and I've never seen a single useful result. Every single time, even for pretty trivial things, we had to fix several bugs and the time we needed went up instead of down. Every. Single. Time.
Best AI can do for programmers is context sensitive auto completion.
Another thing where AI might be useful is static code analysis.