Not at all the case any more. Arch isos now come with an install script (literally just 'archinstall' from the live medium). I had never installed arch and it took me 15 minutes, it's a fully guided setup.
I'm a Manjaro user specifically because of the easy install. It's not that I'm not capable (Linux/sysadmin internals are interesting to me and I am often going down rabbit holes and exploring distro differences) but it's just that (a) when I want to install an OS I usually want to be up and running fast and (b) I'd like something with more conventions so when things do inevitably go wrong it's a bit easier to reason about the system relative to other users.
So I'm wondering if my next install should be Arch or one of the other Arch-based distro -- is archinstall not a 15 minute install or does it have some other pressing issue?
The Arch community has a lot of toxicity. Maybe there's some sunk cost from people getting Arch installed the hard way, but it's full of the attitude that Arch should be hard.
Nobody says "Arch is a great first choice of distro" except with the explicit qualifier "if you want to get your hands dirty and read a lot of documentation". So nobody that comes to Arch has any excuse, in my opinion, for not bothering to learn how to do it. Again this isn't the attitude "Arch should be hard". It's the attitude that you shouldn't expect other Arch users to spoonfeed you when they've already provided a comprehensive wiki and installation guide and there are searchable forums full of troubleshooting you can refer to. Arch isn't made hard on purpose, but as a natural consequence of the way it is structured (minimally) it is difficult for a completely new user to get going unless they read the documentation.
Ironically, projects like archinstall prove that difficulty isn't a goal but an unfortunate side-effect: they're perfectly happy to make things easier if it doesn't compromise the integrity of the project. They're not going to automatically install a desktop environment for everyone just to make things easier.
The deepest I’ve had to go is search the forum if I couldn’t figure out something from the wiki.
The wiki is so good that it’s common to come across it and find your answer for your linux question even if you are using a distro other than arch.
Eventually someone joined the community who did want to maintain an installer, so now they have archinstall.