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'd just like to vent that these kind of discussions are one of the big turnoffs of the Linux community in general. People speak "in absolutes".
You either do it this way or you're a dumbass. You either use the distribution I like or you're doing it WRONG. You shouldn't use Arch because you're not experienced enough, you should use Mint for an arbitrary amount of time before you graduate to the good stuff.
You friends get way too worked up over other people's personal preferences and push your biased and subjective views as facts.
Is Arch Linux the right fit for a newbie to Linux? The right answer is "it depends", not "never". Would I recommend Arch to my mom? No. Would I recommend it to my programmer colleague who already lives in the Powershell? Sure, why not.
I think the difficulty with Arch is not about using the command line, but about knowing the Linux ecosystem.
People coming from OS X or Windows probably don't know the difference between a WM, or a DE or what Display server they should use.
They don't know if they need to install a network manager or setup sudo on a new system.
These things come from experience of using a Limix system even a mainstream one like Ubuntu.
Different people deal with things in different ways. Some (most?) people feel like learning linux is undesirable or a chore, while others embrace the sense of discovery and exploring a new and exciting thing. After using Windows for decades I don't want the same experience, I want something completely different.
Before I installed Linux I played a bunch on a virtual machine. I installed several distributions, desktop environments, hardware compatibility. I ended up landing on EndeavourOS more than a year ago. Never borked my setup, never had update problems, never had a problem I couldn't solve (more like Arch Wiki solving it for me).
I like to learn things by doing things, I like to fail fast and learn from the mistakes. EndeavourOS provided the exact experience I was looking for and would recommend it to someone with a similar mentality. I wouldn't recommend Arch (or arch based distros) to people who aren't tech savy, but people make it seem more complicated and brittle than it actually is.