I’ve been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn’t ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run “pacman -Syu --noconfirm” willynilly.

I still wouldn’t recommend it as the first distro as it doesn’t hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.

Do you have anything to back that up with or are you speaking from personal incredulity? What you said certainly does not apply to e.g. contemporary smartphones.

Maintaining a high SoC is still very damaging to battery life.

Jerboa users would find this very funny, if they could see it.

Why? If anything the EU tends towards pro-privacy/anti-authoritarianism and has mostly avoided this kind of security theater seen in other countries.