That’s true, but installing a whole new desktop environment also kind of goes against the whole “ease of use” part. If someone’s going to go to a whole different flavor they might as well just use something like Mint or Mint DE unless they specifically need Ubuntu for a dev environment or program/driver compatibility. That way they can still get the ease of use benefit but without dealing with all of the weird oddities that Ubuntu can introduce.
Not OP, I like gnome and all but I Ubuntu’s extensions/custom version of gnome is awful and makes trying to change settings so much worse because the gnome documentation doesn’t always match with all of the changes Ubuntu adds on top. Maybe they’re talking about that?
About your side comment - It isn’t necessarily that they’re being forced to use Office. It’s more that office is the standard that everyone else is using, and therefore the standard everyone expects to work with. If anything breaks or displays incorrectly, it becomes your fault for not using the standard.
To be clear, I hate Microsoft and their monopoly, and the blaming I just described as well. It definitely happens though. Same reason most of Gen Z uses iPhones: if you have an Android phone any problem with phones/chatting suddenly becomes your fault, even if the underlying reason is actually because of Apple.