I heard some pretty horrific shit about Mint in more recent times. But I guess even then, it can't be worse than base Ubuntu, right? Right?

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from what I read, "beginner" distributions pretty much all suck. None of them are reliable, and all of them are made by retards. At least the ones I looked at had some reviews that really made me not want to recommend them.

If I was going to introduce someone to Linux right now, it would not be that simple. Would probably go with Devuan plus some explanations of how to use Synaptic, or whatever. And the dumb shit that it inherits from Debian.