In fact, I would advise newbies to stay away from altcoins and only invest in Bitcoin in order to be on the safe side of the game, as there will be many shitcoins that will not recover after this bear market.
I wonder why a newbie would even want to invest in altcoins. Crypto newbies may not even be aware of how to look at a project white paper and identify if there are some tricky things with it. Newbies don't know fully well how to check the Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Discord, and other social platforms of a project to decide if it's a project to risk their funds for. So newbies wasting their time on altcoins may result in the fact that they are just burrying their funds in a snowy environment that cannot melt when warmth comes. It is wise if newbies clearly stay away from altcoins. Even some experienced crypto enthusiasts sometimes get disappointed along the way when they try to take advantage of some altcoin pump and dump price manipulation.
We all have our differences and experiences, some people started their crypto investment with Bitcoin and some with altcoins, and the result will never be the same, in the crypto space, timing is everything, some buy Bitcoin and sell too soon, some buy and hold but failed to take profit when Bitcoin reached a new all-time high.
It's been several years now that I have been into crypto investment and I have made a lot of money from Bitcoin and much more from altcoins, I could easily say that I got lucky but that's not entirely true because I spent most of my time learning about crypto projects and what makes them better than the rest.
I choose some good altcoins and also some very bad ones, but this result reshaped me and I am getting more experience with crypto projects, once beaten am twice shy right? I can't open my eye and make the same mistakes over again, this time, I am much better than who I used to be.
So OP, it's not all altcoins are bad for investment, and I started with both altcoins and Bitcoin, it's less fun for me if I can't figure out why one is better than the rest.