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.
Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.