That’s a crazy take though. Everyone knows that what you’re most familiar with is way more intuitive than something you’ve never touched in your life.

There are more households that drive cars than ride a bike - is a car therefore a more intuitive to use transport tool than a bike?

How intuitive something is only affects the initial experience. This is why driving a car usually takes a year to learn in most countries - it’s not very intuitive. If you know how to drive a car, however, you can learn to drive a bus much faster - it’s now intuitive because you already know how to drive a car, which is similar.

So of course whichever DE replicates windows the best is going to be the most intuitive. Doesn’t mean that it’s better once you’ve gotten used to it though.

I reject the premise that just because more people use Windows, a Windows UX must be the most intuitive and alternatives must appear more complicated to use.

That's one hell of a 'heavy lift' to create a non-Windows UX experience that is more intuitive and easier for Windows user to adapt to that is completely different from the Windows UX experience they know today.

Not saying it's not possible, but I think you'd have better success in pulling people over from Windows to Linux if the UX experience was similar, since they're already dealing with a retraining issue (Linux) that is a barrier they have to overcome when transferring over.

There's no need to add more obstacles to that transference process.