How did Arch get this bad rep?

Because so many people love it and make a point of its 'brilliance', so it's funny to take it down a peg.

Myself, long ago, I moved from Arch to Ubuntu partly for ease of downloads on bad internet in Asia (in-country package mirror, and obviously less downloads overall); and partly because I didn't want my time and mental energy to be 'on call' for a random breakage from an upgrade. Breakages were occasional for me, and normally easily fixable, but took immediate time and effort.

I still think Arch is great, but I've got through some distro hops to end up currently on Mint, from wanting stability + a couple of binaries that are published for Ubuntu and not other distros.

Was tempted by NixOS or Guix, but... not just yet.