Idk, I wouldn't really call Steam OS an Arch distro. It's not quite as extreme as the relationship between PlayStation and FreeBSD, but it's in that realm.

The user has very little control over the base system, which is distributed by Valve. Most of the user's interaction is on the surface, such as through Flatpaks and whatnot, not w/ the package manager. It's like other distros like Aeon (openSUSE) and Silverblue (Fedora) where the user doesn't really interact w/ the distro itself.

it takes minutes on the forums to convince me what a horrible idea that would be.

The reason the forum is like that is because Arch is designed to be a system where you have the tools to solve problems yourself and not need to ask for help. That's why the install process is so manual, the intention is that if you can make it through that, you probably won't need much help from anyone else. The install process has gotten easier, but it's still to a point where it generally discourages "casuals", for lack of a better term.

I used Arch for about 5 years and I think I interacted w/ the forums like twice. If interacting w/ the forums is something that's important to you, then Arch probably isn't for you. Something like Debian or Fedora will probably be a better fit.

I really don't get people's fascination w/ Arch. It's basically a LEGO-style Linux distro, and that's not really what most seem to want. I switch from Arch to openSUSE because openSUSE had everything I liked from Arch (rolling release, mostly-vanilla packages, etc) and most of the reliability of a release-based distro. I still don't recommend it for new users because the community is pretty small so getting help is a bit harder, but people are generally nicer than Arch users.