I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a "paper cuts", I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

I won't say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

I really do not think that these "paper cuts" are representative of peoples' general experiences with Linux.