Arch or derivatives (Manjaro, EndeavourOS) might be up your alley. They may not provide a ton of CLI stuff right out of the gate but there's lots of funky stuff in the AUR. As far as install goes it's not as difficult as memes portray and there are scripts that make it simple.
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Well, NixOS is pretty easy to install using their graphical installer and it has one of the largest package repositories. It has basically everything you could need.
There's a version of Debian whose desktop environment is just the CLI. (I learned the "fun way" at first boot whilest helping a friend install Linux on their machine). It was certainly a lightweight, fast, & easy installation, I'll say that! Lol!
I am running Debian 12 on another machine.
Is MX or antiX in the running?
I believe any Linux can be "CLI Linux" as Linux is designed CLI first. Do you have an end goal? You can either not install a desktop or just stop and disable your display manager
The purpose I have in mind for the system will be a place to code, C, python, and some BASIC if I can find a nice CLI one. I have installed MX linux, and will probably keep the window manager as installed but just use a lot of terminal emulators.
Sounds like a decent setup. Good luck
Alma being red hat will support pretty much everything. You would still need to install it with yum.