I think there's times where they work better than others and really depends on the dish. If you make a nice vegetable soup with fixed potatoes, and toss in some twirly pasta at the end, then they will work well as a medley and each bring something a little different to the taste and texture. Same with a vegetable curry with potatoes over rice.
If you had potatoes au gratin, and somehow incorporated Mac and cheese, ignoring differences in cook time between the potatoes and pasta, I think you'd feel they were a bit redundant. Not bad tasting, but they aren't really bringing something that different to the party.
When I think about balanced food I always look to the mix of fats, acids, salts, and sugars with starches providing structure for those flavors. So I would look to mix starches that being a different type of structure to make an interesting dish.
Good on him for giving it an honest go. I do think that for fresh installs, laptops feel more likely to run into issues unless you are buying very mainstream hardware or using the OEM image with the driver bundles in the installer.
Also, using edge, native tools, and no cleanup or debloat is just painful. But I suppose the point is to highlight what you get out of the box, and if you used Titus Utils to dump all the quality of life things on the system you aren't really assessing the stock os.