My experience was that I had the benefit of reading your and Brendan's posts recommending buying a basket of shares ~20 years ago. I did that for a decade or so and really enjoyed learning and the ups and downs, hours and hours spent watching the Deepwater Horizon disaster wondering how best to play it with my BP shares, hunting down SCRIP/DRIP shares to maximise compounding etc. It ultimately lead me to start a business using the money I'd invested.
Fast forward 10-15 years I had money to invest in the markets again, but this time decided to go with a single diversified ETF. The experience is utterly different - I spend no time researching companies, no emotional tugs while in that world of researching towards the latest meme stock, no time rifling through stuff like SCRIP receipts and dividend withholding tax slips to get them over to my accountant every year, no time trying to harvest annual CGT allowances, no time lying awake at night wondering if buying Vodafone was a good call or not buying Microsoft will punish me. When I buy I stick the date/price in a Google doc that my accountant can review in nearly a decades time and I look at the price on the index every week or so with interest, that's it.
While I loved the process of learning to buy individual shares I don't think it is for the vast majority of people, and having seen both sides of this I am very firmly of the view that we should be recommending a single ETF to most people off the street that ask for advice on AAM and not a basket of shares. The individual shares approach is in my view letting the tax tail vigorously wag the safe investment dog for the average punter.