I also find the packaging system to be a bit complicated with Pacman and Yay compared to others, but I haven’t messed around with it too much. I was disappointed in the lack of a UI tool for browsing and managing software packages.
I’m on regular old archlinux and I use pamac, because I like gui package managers.
Works great for me and it can be set up to combine the arch repos, AUR, flatpak and snap (or any subset of these). That way you don’t need multiple seperate tools. Which is great.
People hate on it, because arch users prefer commandline. And also because pamac devs messed up badly a couple of times, but as far as I can tell the developers are quick to fix any problems and there have been no major incidents recently.
In general I would say, arch does no handholding and lets you do anything you want. If you set up your system in a bad way, you will have a bad experience. And you need lots of knowledge of tools, packages, custom solutions and configs to perfectly tailor it to your needs. Which is not good for beginners, but great for experienced Linux users.