> There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Very few people of any age understood how local computing (or any computing) works. There's probably more now since most of the world is connected.

Profit scale has reached a point where commercial OS creators have to do stuff like shove ads into the UI. There's probably more legitimate need from non-developers to use Linux now than ever before, just to get a better base-line user experience.