Yeah, it's weird to talk about OpenSuse MicroOS and Fedora Atomic when they are not even the flagship desktop distros of their respective families. I guess the author drank the atomic kool-aid and thinks that's a killer feature for a consumer OS.

That said, Ubuntu is not really aimed at beginners anymore. Canonical has shifted hard to enterprise offerings over the past 5 years or so. Take a look at their web site — they barely spare a word for desktop Linux anymore. This is what you'll see on the main page:

"The complete guide to RAG"

"Modern enterprise open source"

A "Products" dropdown with thirteen items, maybe one of which is comprehensible to a beginner.

For all the hate Snaps get (and rightfully so), they make a lot more sense in the context of enterprise deployment. It's like Flatpak but for headless servers and with professional support. It took me a long time to understand Canonical's game there, because I couldn't shake the idea of Ubuntu as a beginner's distro.

I guess it would be cool to have an atomic OS designed for beginners, since the current crop are more complex than traditional distros, not less. But I don't think atomicity itself really matters, especially if you're talking about systems that are mostly locked down to begin with.