I think we also need to recognize that before Chromebooks it was MacBooks and iPads, with much the same arguments. Mac OS is Unix and thus in principle easier to learn the hardcore stuff, but the interface even back then abstracted enough of the underlying guts away that you had to want to do it and know to do it; you generally needed a LOT less tech literacy to use a mac than a Windows machine at that time. And in my pre-chromebook generation, it was the macbook kids in college who didn't have tech literacy. Apple's goal in distributing macbooks to schools at low cost was to get kids introduced to the ecosystem early on, so when they grew up they'd want to buy Apple computers—because if you grow up learning the Mac OS interface, then switching to Windows or Linux is very hard, and if you learn computers on Windows, in contrast, then Mac OS's highly-abstracted interface feels deeply unintuitive.
Google did unbelievable damage with the Chromebooks, but we need to recognize that this was the continuation of a trend that started nearly 10 years earlier, and there's a large cohort of younger millenials/earlier gen Z people who predated the Chromebooks-in-schools era, but nonetheless have lower tech literacy because of the influence Apple had in schools in the 2000s.
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