i use arch because i find it much easier to start from a system with just a tty and install software i need than to have a full distro and to find and remove packages that i don’t want/need and replace them with the ones i need - makes maintenance easy and i know what’s running on my system. it’s also in my experience one of the few rare distros that package a non-broken fcitx5 which i rely on (but that’s specific to my setup). and the build system is awesome. the community might be a bit harsh on people who post error messages to forums without any attempts at basic troubleshooting.

i expect that people who make these memes installed arch because they heard that it’s a bleeding edge distro that all the kool kidz use, downloaded a bunch of packages from the AUR which messed up their dependencies after the update and now their system isn’t booting right. if you don’t skip updates for a long time and don’t do weird tricks with system packages, arch might be genuinely one of the easiest distros once you get past the installation which can be tedious if you’re used to automated installers.