I think the great thing about Arch is that, despite the hype, there is nothing special about it.

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.