I'm a programmer and I can't even stand the formatting on Linux distros. Windows was usable even as a kid.

What's wrong with mkfs.<tab-tab>[select-middle-click] /dev/sdc1?

The fact that you need to invoke lsblk/blkid/mount first to be sure what you're about to erase forever, then possibly sync and unmount, and only then format. Keeping the same target device at every step is completely on user and the price of a typo is huge.

I love (and usually prefer) the Unix way, but it's as dangerous as it's powerful and the amount of the required prior knowledge is incomparable.

In that case you could use gnome-drive or whatever it's called, it's all point and click!

Of course there's GUI solutions for GNU+Linux, but I was specifically answering to your "what's wrong with mkfs" comment.

Moreover, the GP mentions "as a kid" which is probably at least 10 years ago, when the choice of GUI tools and their availability in various distros and their repos was much more limited.

Those are the low level tools. there are things like parted that bundle them together if you want something more guided. GUI versions are available too, and since many installers ship with GUIs these days you don't even have to touch the terminal anymore. Unless you install arch, but then learning the plumbing is part of the experience.

Discoverability. The Windows approach is kid friendly because you can discover it by right clicking on a drive in Explorer, ignoring every option you don't understand, and pressing start.

Knowing that "mkfs" is a thing or that "/dev/sdc1" is a thing pushes the minimum knowledge requirements orders of magnitude higher.

Yes, there's gnome for that!

To improve things, we need to talk about common user scenarios. Problem is, normal users will approximately never have to format a disk, and it's a perfectly adequate interface for nerds.

If this were the 90s and everyone was still using floppy disks, yeah it would be worth making it slightly more user-friendly.

This thing literally is from the 90s when everyone was still using floppy disks.

This interface was perfectly acceptable in the 90s, and it's perfectly acceptable today. Dropping a big graphic with a large circle button labelled format would have been worse. I say this as someone who writes my fair share of aesthetic user interfaces.

My takeaway is different. If your "temporary code" is sufficient to solve the problem, then it may last 30 years. If it was an actual problem, it would have been fixed by now.