"npx hardhat init" was the command to create a new project, but it seems to have been removed. The tutorial now states that you can create a sample project with the command "npx hardhat", except this only brings up the help menu. I would reccomend the truffle suite as an alternative, the only advantage hardhat ever had over truffle was the ease of setting up a project quickly with npx hardhat init, now that their best feature has been removed there is no point in using them.

So hardhat updated their docs on March 4th 2023, creating a basic sample project seems to work again if you follow the steps here. https://hardhat.org/hardhat-runner/docs/guides/project-setup