I don’t know if I agree that Linus’ decision making can be attributed to role playing as an “average user” so much as it being a case of too much experience hindering him. He’s someone who has been interacting with tech for his entire life and has become very proficient at it within his domain of knowledge. He is definitely someone who is used to tossing the user manual aside when he gets a new device and stumbling his way through until he groks it, and he is using that same approach with Linux. This ends up meaning that he just does stuff that should work the way that he’s used to (i.e. follows the Windows paradigm) and then runs into problems because of it. I think that a lot of his issues basically stem from his ego not permitting him to take a step back to re-learn some of the fundamentals, or least map them onto his Windows-focused mental model.

All that said, Linux distros have varying levels of issues and quirks that have to be learned/dealt with, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with pointing those pain points out. Linus just needs to take a step back and realise that he’s going to have to actually learn something if he wants to be successful.