I think these how-tos for "morons" are actually something good especially for users not very familliar with Linux or PCs in general.

Ubuntu has a great community and you can find guides for literally everything from cooking you own kernel to how to shut down your PC.

And there are people which need these guides. Just telling them they would be stupid wouldn't be very polite and these guides help most of the noobs not to start the same old discussions over and over again.

Personally I've been using Linux for 10 years and just recently moved some of my boxes to Ubuntu, not particullarly because of the great amount of guides but because I like the community.

I'm still using Debian on my Servers and Gentoo on one of my laptops. They usually take a bit longer to set up but are way more stable, but for new users are kind of hard to grasp. Especially distros like Gentoo or Slack*