Fwiw I was avoidant of arch for a long time and took the deep dive a few years back. I've really not had to do any more debugging work than I have to with Debian (which I'm also a fan of and use).

EndeavourOS helps a lot with smoothing over the possible gotchas and my machines with it tend to run steam games (proton or native) out of the box the majority of the time.

I finally switched from Windows to Linux and chose CachyOS. This was months ago. I never had to fix anything (so far). There was a fuck up by me once, but that wasn't the distros and could've happened on any distro. Honestly couldn't be happier with it being arch based, as it's really nice to basically get anything that is released instantly as a package update.

I haven't had to hunt for packages that aren't years old for anything as I was used to on Debian (used on most of my servers). And while the AUR is there, I think I got a total of two things installed from there, anything else was just there in the repos.

But if you've got a setup that already works, and you're happy with, why change anything? Having something that works for you is what makes the large amounts of choices in the Linux world so great.

Isn't SteamOS Arch-based?

I have found that with Arch I don't run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.

Same. I tried arch many moons ago and heard all the stories and that was enough.

Maybe it's better by now but fedora has been stable and things like bazzite with immutability exist. Not sure why I'd pick cachy then. Especially if the gains are that minimal.