Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There's a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don't even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don't understand how a wiki works.
You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.
You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don't even know what bloat means if you can't set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don't matter.
You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we'll talk about those arch forks.
(Also, most arch forks that don't use arch repos break the aur, so you don't even have the one thing you want from arch)
I started with mint more than 10 years ago because a friend of mine told me it was one, if not the best, distro for newbies (that was a fucking lie). Idk how mint is doing today but back then was kind of a mess and dealing with it wasnt easy, so i dont really know how or why i switched to debian for a while. With debian i had a lot of problems with some software, mostly proprietary drivers for esotic hardware i was running back then due to me buying the cheapest laptops available, so i started distro hopping for a while. Every distro but fedora was debian based so it felt a lot like a more of the same experience and I felt stuck in a loop where i was eventually gonna reinstall my whole system after breaking something i didnt even know existed.
Then one day i found arch. Installing it wasnt as easy as clicking install on the live system's guy, but just by following the wiki general instructions i didnt have any issues the first time. It felt good. Building the system block by block helped me understand how things work, the package manager was the best i had seen and the newbie corner basically had the solutions for all my screw-ups, even more than ask-ubuntu did. Everybody in the community was super helpful (even some of the devs). Then there was the AUR, with almost every piece of esotic or proprietary software i needed, much easier than adding some random guy's repositories to apt or enabling backports on debian. Also i found out that i prefer having a rolling release. With arch i learned how to use and maintain my system, and i just stuck with it.
That said, just how some use linux just to brag about it with their normie friends, many many people use arch to brag about it with other linux users (like my friend did), mostly beacause arch has the infamous reputation that it is hard to install, hard to maintain, easy to break. Which is actually not that bad considering that all these people are gonna end up posting in the newbie corner lol.
Truth is that arch is not harder than any other distro. It only comes down to your will to learn and RTFM What i think worked for me was the transparency. Nobody said it was as easy to use as windows, but nobody in the wiki said "dont do this unless you are an experienced user". Arch is not another fork of ubuntu pretending to be "even more user friendly", it's just arch.
I think the problem is about distros like antergos (rip), manjaro, garuda, endevour trying to oversimplify something that only needs you to RTFM only ending up breaking something they tried to automate and hide behind a curtain that wasnt meant to be automated and was meant to be learned to manage, by hand
EDIT: spelling. I'm a non-english speaker, if you find any more errors just tell me and i will correct them (or clarify something better)
I think mint is crazy better these days compared to 10 years ago, and it probably just came down to "we want to be user friendly to those who need their hands held" crashing into "actual users who need their hand held are trying it out." 10 years ago, I think there simply wasn't enough interested in Linux outside of Linux circles to properly test and figure things out, not to mention the strides the software itself has made in supporting more hardware more seamlessly.
The thing about RTFM is that users don't, and the users that stuff like Mint is geared towards is those who when asked to read a wiki page, will simply give up. Windows has a cottage industry of people who do various things to make it easier for that kind of user. For example, just installing Windows on a device for you (albeit with bloatware usually) complete with all the drivers for your hardware. For most of the hardware on a laptop (audio, internet, HIDs, USB), that'll have you set for life without having to touch anything and for the graphics that'll at least have you set for several years without having to touch anything. And it's not like Linux doesn't have this level of support, it's just that Windows has this level of support for consumers and Linux typically has it relegated to the enterprise sphere.
That being said, it's insane how easy it is now to just install Mint, or PopOS, or even Ubuntu and have a working system. But most users don't even install their Windows, much less a completely foreign OS.
For what it's worth, I have switched three machines of mine from Win10 to Mint in the last year, and in each case it was much easier and faster to install than Windows. And of course, daily use is much faster and smoother than Windows, but that is true of all distros. It's just worth mentioning because mint is made to be the full featured user friendly experience (some might even call it bloated) out of the box, yet it's still a rocket in comparison.
One was a typical work-issued Dell laptop w/ port replicator + M365, one was an old PC at home I built several years ago, and the last was an even older PC I built like 14 years ago.
Just yesterday at work I installed Win10 in VirtualBox so I could test a Windows app that gets built alongside our main embedded Linux software (used the VM since a certain popup window secondary to the main app wasn't immediately working in Wine). Holy crap was it painful after being used to the Mint installer.
Then when I got home I decided to turn on that 14 year old system that's been off for a month (when I installed the latest point release 22.1) to let it update. Even using the GUI updater, and even though it had to update the updater itself before updating however many dozen packages AND the kernel, I timed the entire process at five minutes flat. On the computer from 2011, with a pretty old & small SATA SSD system drive. And you can use the PC like normal until it's done, when it shows a banner suggesting you reboot when you can because of the kernel update.
Again, nothing special in the Linux world where software is actually created with users put first. But still noteworthy for being the "easy" distro that looks a lot like Windows when you first boot it up.
I'm not posting this to say anything negative about Arch, either. That kind of distro is very important to begin with, and Arch in particular seems it's good enough that it might be the new Debian. Especially with SteamOS switching to it.