My key advice was always ‘avoid the fuck out of Arch’.

Arch is when you really want to hate Linux and not understand what to do, as a beginner.

100% incorrect, you just need a well maintained arch distro like Garuda or CachyOS.
I think endeavor OS could also do well. in my experience, the install process was easy, kinda like Debian (the first distro I installed). Dare I say it is easier than (or maybe slightly comparable to) Arch with archinstall?