Am I too old?
My first linux install took me days to get to the point of showing a desktop. Not catering to advanced users is the novelty in the linux world imo - and it’s not entirely there yet.
The entire industry is obsessed with onboarding and first-experience ease and intuitive interfaces and making things "just work", etc, etc. This includes Linux, which still has rough edges but the approach of just making things simple instead of easy and aiming at advanced users is very rare these days.
They couldn't be more different.
On the contrary, FreeBSD also dumps you on a command line. But it does have defaults for most things and it took me only a few hours you set up because everything is guided better with the defaults in mind.
I really like the idea of a stable base OS with rolling software also, and the ports collection (which is quite similar to the AUR). But there's more ways to do manual and arch's isn't necessarily the best IMO.