Maybe you’ve been sold a bit of a lie.

Linux is not like Windows. Linux will never be like Windows. It is first and foremost a general operating system, not necessarily a Desktop operating system.

IMO, that means you will never truly be able to completely avoid using the terminal here or there.

Telling people that it’s easy to switch from Windows to Linux is just not true. Linux just works differently and going in with the expectation that things will work the same way only serves to disappoint those brave enough to attempt the switch.

If you try again, go in with the mindset that you’ve never used a computer before, and without needing to depend on Linux for your day to day computer work. See it as a tinkering side project, and maybe it will stoke your curiosity enough that you’ll want to use it day to day.

can’t we all just enjoy the frog without associating it with any politics

Except when a bug pops up somewhere. Ownership/Responsibility changes in sub-Planck-second time when assigning blame.

The CLI is scriptable/automatable and unambiguous when sharing instructions with coworkers. Both of these things make it very useful to know the commands. I do agree that it helps in some situations to visualize what is going on with a GUI/TUI though (neogit for nvim or magit for emacs are great if anyone is wondering), it can make things clearer at a glance.

And how does that work? How do you unmount the root directory of a live system and invoke a script?

Nextcloud is a FOSS fork of OwnCloud. Both projects are great in their own way, hugely successful and serve a lot of people very well. They just moved in different directions.

This is just one example of many. Ability to fork is super important to ensure that projects stay open source, like in this example.