I find a good compromise for new players who want to make their own characters is to help them choose the basics of race, class and background - plus any first level important choices, like warlock patron, cleric domain or sorcerous origin, and maybe a spell or two - and then make them a character. I get them to name the character and play with them for the first session, and then check in and freely allow changes to skills, spells and equipment - or even changing the character at a much higher level - until they’re happy.
Another option I have tried with success is to leave as many choices as possible until they become relevant in the game. This lets you skip a lot of choices up front and get into play much quicker. For example, I never ask players to decide in advance what bonus languages their characters speak. Instead, when they encounter a language for the first time, I ask if anyone with a free language choice speaks it, and to tell us where and how they learned it. This gives them a chance to pick something that’s definitely plot relevant, and also helps them contextualise what speaking that language means, since they’re encountering it as part of the story.
This technique can be extended to starting skill proficiencies (“you’ll need to roll a Perception check - is that something you think your character is particularly good at?”), choice of primary weapon (“it’s your turn to attack - what weapon do you pull out of your pack?”) and spells (“on your turn, you can cast a spell if you want - which one do you know?”), so long as you’re okay with pausing the game to explain and assist with these choices at the time. I recommend prepping a brief list of good options with brief descriptions, drawn from the choices available during character creation, rather than the full list in the PHB; you can revisit and change afterwards if they’re not happy. It also works best if you choose one thing at a time - i.e. let them choose and cast just that first spell, then when it’s time to cast again, see if they want to choose another different one.
Finally, to give players a bit of autonomy, I made a Twine tool to help guide them through the basic options. It doesn’t handle any mechanics save the very basic choices I mentioned above. I published it on my web site here - scroll down to Dungeons & Dragons resources under Tabletop Games. I’ve had really good results using this with new players, as have a few friends starting their own games. (Note that it’s optimised for first time players with no experience at D&D, but it’s easy enough to skip past the first couple of pages of advice.)