tl;dr Title
It’s common knowledge at this point that Arch has a reputation for being very difficult to use which led to it becoming a meme ( like everything else on the internet). Even tho Arch users swear that it is actually trivial to install and use for someone who is willing to read documentation, it is also known that distributions with significantly higher requirements on overall *nix knowledge like Gentoo, Oasis, KISS and Crux (?) exist. So my question is this: was Arch used to be harder to install and use? Because I heard bad things about Debian’s installation process too, even tho it is incredibly easy now. I also hear Ubuntu being bad for user privacy, even tho that whole Amazon thing happened years ago under a completely different management. Things move fast in Linux family’s world, was Arch a very different system back in 2006?
I had the same experience as OP a while ago, wanted to try installing Arch on bare metal without trying on a VM first, and was scared as shit to fuck it up. Managed to get a working install on the first try just by following the wiki, just had to redo it because I fucked up some stuff with the filesystem that lead to not being able to snapshot the system (BTRFS). It ended up being so easy I don’t even want to mess with Calamares anymore.
It’s probably much more about documentation than difficulty itself.