My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.
The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.
Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.
Obviously this study was done by people who are part of the far-left liberal establishment and are lying /s
But seriously, I doubt that people who buy into anti-woke rhetoric are going to care, they’re stuck in this “us vs them” bubble that’s incredibly difficult to escape from.