I actually don’t know whether timeshift can just run easily from a live USB, but I don’t see why not.
But of course that also requires you to have installed and set up timeshift before (which is obviously a good idea)
It’s quite a different deal when the whole operating system it built around a timeshift-like concept.
It kinda depends a bit on the user’s background… For someone who is used to windows and how computers in general works, I would probably agree with you.
But for people who are more phone/tablet native, I don’t think something like Fedora Silverblue is actually that bad of a choice. It comes natively with Gnome 3, which isn’t too dissimilar to Android or iOS. Updates are installed in one fell swoop with a reboot, just like Android or iOS. Flatpaks behave much more like an App on Android or iOS, they are self contained, and don’t affect eachother.
I just set up my daughters (9 y/o) first school laptop, and picked Fedora Silverblue, and apart from learning about the save icon, and learning how to store files in a filesystem, she was pretty much instantaneously functional, having most of her prior computing experience on an Android phone.