I'm sorry, but the fact that they failed to renew their SSL certificates and told their users to change their system clocks as a workaround, not once, not twice, but FIVE times so far... well, that's not petty. That's security 101. That tells me they can't be trusted to provide a secure operating system.
The rest of your points, I mostly agree with you on. I really wanted to like Manjaro when I tried it a few years ago. I would love to see more newbie-friendly distros that aren't based on Ubuntu and GNOME. But I can't recommend a distro that can't even manage to do SSL renewals right.
All five times are listed here.
None of that other stuff matters if they're this incompetent at something as basic as SSL certificates. It's not dogma. It's not nitpicking. This is Security 101. I can't recommend a distro that fails this badly at a basic security task to newcomers.