I think it's improved, but I installed Debian on a laptop recently and the fresh system came up without wifi, which was bewildering because it connected to wifi during the install process. Took me a bunch of troubleshooting to find a rfkill setting buried in the system.

AI: you probably turned on airplane mode

me: I definitely didn't

So I love debian but it's still rough around the edges and I'm not sure I'd recommend non-technical people dive in.

It's much better these days.

The old installer (boot-floppies) was legendarily prickly at the time Ubuntu was introduced, but it's long since been replaced by the much friendlier debian-installer. And the default install images now include non-free firmware by default, so modern wifi, bluetooth, and graphics hardware are fully supported.

To be honest, Debian now tends to be fairly vanilla and boring and it's actually Ubuntu that often ends up being a bit weirder. For example, consider how they treat the Snap packaging system for consumer software, or the rust rewrite of coreutils. Debian provides both as supported options (of course it does, Debian supports pretty much everything!), but Ubuntu pushes them to all users by default.