Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
Any website that doesn’t have a simple sign up in two steps (username/email, password) and everything clearly explained to them like a 5 year old will receive tons of complaints about being confusing. It’s just the internet