Judging by various posts I’ve seen Arch and Debian both don’t “just work” for many users.

Also I really don’t get your point about providing a feature to make others “obsolete”… what do popular distros like Manjaro or Mint provide that make Arch/Ubuntu obsolete? And at least Manjaro has managed to be in the news quite a few times unfortunately.

The point of the article is that Alpine works, both on a technical level and as a project, without unnecessary drama.

I’d (mostly) say the same about OpenBSD too, btw.