Everyone who uses Arch seems to love it, and everyone who doesn't seems to respect it. So congratulations on sustaining a well-loved project with a reputation for technical excellence, for 20 years!
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(I don't use Arch btw)
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(I don't use Arch btw)
In other words, Arch is mostly Linux From Scratch plus a binary package manager with dependencies and standard choices for everything (tooling written in C, standard kernel, GNU libc, SystemD, etc). Plus a great wiki.
Arch sits at a local maximum in terms of design, right next to Alpine and a few other distributions with similar design choices. In my opinion, the other interesting local maximum is where NixOS and GuixSD sit. It's almost the other extreme, declarative vs imperative.
Non-rolling releases by necessity add a lot more complexity, and those distribution maintainers have to consider many trade-offs in managing the "waterfall" approach.
Arch (mostly) assumes that 1) upstream knows what they're doing and 2) individual users are better able to make choices about which software to install and how to deviate from its default configuration.
Sometimes, less is more.