How is offering any other server other than (only) mastodon.social "pushing people into the deep end". If they don't even know what instances are, chances are they won't even notice the difference between being on mastodon.social or any other of the mastodon approved servers. So saying there's only the option between overwhelming people or defaulting them to mastodon.social is a completely made up false equivalency.
People have made plenty of suggestion in the github thread how to both make onboarding easy AND preserve decentralization and are obviously well aware of the benefits of making things easier, so to say this is some nerdy gatekeeping thing completely mischaracterises what's going on here.