I find this a very reasonable take.
I'll add - I think the complexity is somewhat "over-stated" for Arch at this point. There was absolutely a period where just reading the entire install guide (much less actually completing it) was enough to turn a large number of even fairly technical people off the distro. Archinstall removed a lot of that headache.
And once it's up, it's generally just fine. I moved both my spouse and my children to Arch instead of Windows 11, and they don't seem particularly bothered. They install most of their own software using flatpaks through the store GUI in Gnome, or through Steam, the browser does most of the heavy lifting these days anyways.
I basically just grab their machine and run `pacman -Syu` on it once in a while, and help install something more complicated once in a blue moon.
Still requires someone who doesn't mind dropping into a terminal, but it's definitely not what I'd consider "all that challenging".
YMMV, but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk, updates will break random things every so often, which I found quite frustrating. The risk of this increases the longer the system goes without updates due to accumlated missing config file migrations and such.
Even as someone who uses the terminal daily it's more involved than I really care for.
> but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk,
The good news is you can run `yay -Pwwq` to get the latest Arch news headlines straight in your terminal.
I've wrapped that with running `pacman -Syu` into a little helper script so that I always get to see the news before I run an update.
This is built into my dotfiles by default at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.