People don’t care about the tech stack of Big Social, but they’re not talking just about ActivityPub. When they go to Facebook and Twitter they do not have to select an instance. They create an account and boom. It would be disingenuous to compare and state that Mastodon offers the exact same. That’s more what people means that it’s too techie.
It’s not just frictionless. Plus, due to the maturity and the fact that the communities people care about are already on those platforms the ends justify the means for users.