but there’s no way to auto mount it on startup without editing the fstab file and finding the uuid of the drive through the terminal (at least as far as I could tell) all of the functionality is there, which is rather laudable, but the process is unapproachable for a lot of people.

I haven’t tested it, but gnome-disks (pre-installed in e.g.: Ubuntu and Linux Mint) does have that option: