I am a firm believer that most person's interest in shooting begins with their interest in guns. At first, it's all about the gun. Once owning a gun makes someone's bucket list, then they proceed to obsess about what kind of gun to get. Rifle? Pistol? Semi-auto? Plastic? Steel? Caliber? They give little thought to what they are actually going to use it for.
If, by "most person's" you mean actual number totals, nationwide, today, you are probably correct. And I believe that if you are talking about most people living in urban & metro areas, you are certainly correct.
People who live out in the country, or smaller towns & villages away from or on the edges of more densely populated areas still have a different ratio of gun ownership, and how they came to have the interest.
Lots of us who were children before the computer age, before cable TV, (in some cases before COLOR TV), often learned to shoot years before the were big enough to HAVE a gun of their own. And, almost universally, with a .22RF.
I learned to shoot around age 8 I think, with my MOTHER'S .22 bolt action single shot. It wasn't until I was 14 that I was allowed to have my own rifle. My 14th birthday present was a Winchester rifle.
Numerically, I do think people with my kind of background are the minority today. But I still recommend the .22 to beginners. For the same reasons they have always been used. Low recoil, low report, low cost, and ALL GUN SAFETY RULES APPLY. These are often very important factors for beginners, (and I will admit that when I think of beginners, I always think of children, first).
I have a degree of sympathy for people who only come to guns & shooting as adults, they have missed so much...
However, this is tempered by the significant numbers of such people who think they know more than they do, or know so much that is wrong, AND have the attitude that they know it all. Met more than enough of those, in all fields.