From my experience, it works well when you receive personalized guidance adapted to your skills and needs.
There's a bunch of minimal config online and I also have my own version of the most basic config possible to get anyone started, but throwing them along with docs to any beginner is not the best approach I think. Otherwise, we would have less people quitting before setting up Neovim on their machine. You can't reasonably read the entire Neovim documentation and then you'd have to read every plugin's documentation as well, plus some tutorials to understand how to do things... Due to Neovim extreme adaptability, there are a lot of ways to implement the same feature or do similar tasks and that's where people usually get lost.
Beyond being able to write pure text you certainly want a few features (i.e. file browsing, keybindings, colors, filetype recognition...) and that will require more than a basic config ;) Having someone to help you setup what you need with some features helps you getting a working system quickly. Then - once you understand the basics - you can explore other options and start messing up things as you like :)
To speed up the process, a "lively" discussion is often the best option. For that reason, I like to use Signal or Matrix to help people setting up Neovim on their machine. I like either of these tools because you can preserve your full anonymity. Let me know if that's something you'd like to do. Otherwise, we can use DM (that'll just be slower).
