If anyone is telling you to avoid GNOME, avoid them.
Pick GNOME and both your parents and you as tech support will enjoy life and enjoy using the computer. Wayland is pretty solid on Debian/Ubuntu, but it still is not as “easy” as X11, as X11 behaves normally like Windows for drag/cut/copy mouse operations.
Whatever you like will not necessarily work for them. So avoid pushing any of your own choices on them.
You can enable the Applications menu and put Dash To Panel extension to make things great. Also, there is nothing must have about the Start paradigm from Windows. GNOME’s workflow with the fusion of tiling and snapping windows in GNOME 45 is very close to the future of computing.