You were absolutely right about that. The catch is that for fair bits of ordinary users, they might even be struggling using Windows, and maintaining a VM under Linux would be a huge undertaking. Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying Linux is not good but rather than it's still fair bit of work to be done for ordinary users. I used Windows for almost two decades now, and I'm now at the verge to ditch Windows myself...
I don't think the task is hard but it requires patience as nothing is more complicated but you need to learn to do everything in a somewhat different way.
Despite being a sysadmin I have always been clear with my partners that I would never provide support for their windows computer. If they were willing to switch to linux they could and I would help them, otherwise they were on their own. I never tried forcing anyone. Might look extreme but after a day of work I didn't want to fight an OS/ecosystem I hated for its lack of transparency while I could rest or spend quality time.
When I was married to my first wife we had only one computer that I configured with dual boot so she sometimes used my linux to browse something when I had it open as she didn't care about rebooting and thus ended up curious. After some kind of frustration on windows she started learning a bit deeper how to do things on Linux (I was using slackware at the time!). The thing is she was unemployed at the time so had plenty of time to learn. She was also interested in illustration and we were simply too broke to buy the Adobe Suite so she started using sodipodi and then its fork inkscape that weren't initially ported on windows and gimp. Later on when we divorced she kept that computer as I had purchased a laptop. I have lost contact now but 5y later she told me she had been given a faster one from friends and had replaced the windows that came with it with an ubuntu.
My 2 subsequent long-time partners never did the switch. I believe the difference is not that they are more clueless about computer but with kids and/or a job it leaves little time to dedicate on learning something new despite all the frustration and swearing they get from their windows computer. Current partner is frustrated a lot as her windows 10 simply takes ages to boot and be usable so she sometimes borrow the laptop I dedicate to my daughters which runs on Fedora when she want to consult something quick. Main barrier I guess is the data she already has on the original computer which I patiently wait for it to die or she throw it through the window. I did an exception with my no support rule to set up some backups so she doesn't lose anything when it will happen
