Always has been and always will be. New players to D&D (or nearly any tabletop RPG) ALWAYS need to accept that they will be doing a LOT of reading and learning. The rules books are hundreds of pages. Even if they are not going to play a full caster themselves they are doing themselves a severe disservice by not reading up on and paying attention to how full casters work within the game.
Pish tosh.
Expecting all new players to have read hundreds of pages before ever playing is not only a huge barrier to entry, it's not at all founded in real life.
I can give anecdotal examples left and right, including four that I run for and one I play with, but I urge you to talk to people who can come to D&D via friends, if they read the whole book before making their first character.
I'm sorry, I have to dismiss this out of hand. "Some" definitely will. "All" or "most" is a different story.
If experienced players failed to advise new players about avoiding the worst of poor feat choices nobody at the table gets to act surprised when characters don't work well.
In some circumstances, sure. Someone getting invited into a home group. But a big place lowering the barrier to entry to new players is AL. If a new player shows up at a FLGS wanting to try this new game, you're saying in every case the expereience players will take time fromt he slot to instead critique the character, change it mechanially without alienating a new player who just made a character and may resent "oh don't play a beastmaster and you should have picked a race that gives you a bonus to dex and while you may want a high CHR it leaves you with odd numbers so you should redo you scores like this".
And any player can say at any time, "This PC isn't working out. I'm going to make a new one." The player can then effectively just make the SAME character, just with one or two different choices. Only thing that prevents that kind of thing from happening is an obnoxious DM, and better DM's will simply say, "It's still early in the progress of the campaign, just go ahead and change your feat."
So it's better to only have the option to trash a character, rather than the options to trash it OR fix it.
And "Sir Brandar the II, exactly the same as Sir Brandar but I changed a few mechanical things" is now a best practice.
And the exact thing you are having an experienced DM saying is what I was saying all DMs could be saying. So the player-turned-DM who's nervous and not confident in making rulings and doing everything by the book has guidance that's okay.
No DM worth gaming with really wants to be the one who says, "Ha! You were stupid enough to pick a lame feat! Eat it! It doesn't matter if you spend the rest of the campaign feeling like your PC sucks. The rest of us get to wallow in your disappointment and ineffectiveness and laugh at you. Stupid newbs..." If there is a change to be made it is to simply add relevant advice along these lines prominently in the DMG.
This is a quote from this thread, today, where a DM is saying
exactly what you said
no DM would ever say:
If that were put into a book as a rule, I'd ban it at my table instantly. So what if your character takes a less than optimal path? Decisions have consequences.