I'm not sure if it is, but I don't see it as a hot take. And it sounds reasonable, specially when some distros offer different "flavours" out-of-the-box, and offer you the option of different DEs before you even installed it.
It's certainly not a hot take. Every "which distro should I try thread" is just a discussion of the different DEs out there. I would like to hear about different package managers. I always seem happiest with apt, and I don't know why.