In my experience, Arch users have the opposite attitude. They want to empower you to fix your system yourself. On the Arch forums, even "silly" questions are usually met with a nod in the right direction at least, if not substantial back and forth help. Perhaps they're elitist in the sense that they believe Arch is a superior OS compared to many other options, but not in the sense of gatekeeping.

I don't think that's the case. For me personally it gave me more control over my system and understanding. Nothing elitist about that. Also the arch wiki has very high quality.

It is a good feeling to start with something minimal and build on it until you have something that is totally customized to your needs. Sure you can start with a distro that has a lot of things preconfigured but you will need to reverse engineer first. Arch gives you the greenfield approach which is in my opinion more enjoyable.