For those with the interest, but with less time or patience, I found that installing Arch on a "For messing around, I don't care if I accidentally brick it for a week" laptop was a pretty good way to quickly learn a lot more about how a typical Linux system is assembled.

There's no installer... the boot media just drops you into a live console, and then you're expected to follow the installation guide [1] to set up your disk, bootstrap the core system, select packages, and then do just enough manual configuration that your new machine will survive a reboot.

You'll probably spend the next week or so digging around the Arch Wiki [2] to figure out how to set up the remaining odds and ends. You're definitely not building the system from scratch, but you generally do need to understand more about where things live, how they're configured, and how to turn them on and off, which the wiki is very good at explaining. The stuff you learn here will absolutely come in handy when the same component is misbehaving on a Debian or Red Hat system.

And when you're done, not only are you left with a system that's completely usable (i.e. packages that can actually be upgraded), it'll be configured exactly the way you wanted. In my case, that "messing around" laptop is now my daily driver.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page (a great resource for Linux in general, not only Arch specific things)