Yet telling someone to open regedit, find some deeply-buried branch, create a new binary key, rename it to SetFocusRefreshTimeout and set its value to 0xFFFF is... desktop usability.
It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly. For better or worse, Windows has standard framework for things like GUI widgets, settings storage, installation paths. It might support decades of those standards, but I'm pretty sure you know that Linux kernel and Linux the distro are very different, and much more numerous, and logically do things differently.
> It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly.
I think that this reads better "there is nothing that Microsoft wants regular users to touch that they need to edit in the registry directly." The distinction between the two doesn't really matter as long as the user's interests are reasonably aligned with Microsoft's, but the modern Microsoft-the-ad-company approach to Windows means that this is not at all true.