I second this. The only issue for me was not knowing what to install and use.

E.g. I didn’t know about the sound, and used something old (PulseAudio?) before I learned it should be PipeWire / WirePlumber (or something like that). Honestly, I still don’t understand that properly.

But the point is, I had my sound working ok. Then I had some use case, when it didn’t work. Perhaps with my Bluetooth headphones. Then I just switched to a better newer system, and the thing was resolved automatically.

Theoretically, there might be other aspects of the system when you simply not aware of them. But I think there are not too many, after all. Since I use my Arch Linux computers (PC and laptops, and even a couple of once-Windows tablets now running Arch too) all the time, I mostly settled. And now I don’t even need to reinstall, and setup things, like ever. I needed to migrate to a newer laptop, and to some other computer, I just cloned my system, and was done with it.

With any derivative distro, there’s no confidence in it being present in, say, 5 years. I’m pretty confident in Arch at this point.

Not saying them, derivative distros are bad. If they allow new people jump wagon, great. They’re comfortable with Arch, and perhaps it’s even trivial to rebase such a distro to pure Arch at some point. And I hope them (these distros) contribute to the mainline, not just parasitising off the original work, like DHH et al.