I can’t tell if you really want to have an argument about Arch or are sincerely curious.
Arch expects you to be pretty involved in deciding what runs on your system and maintaining it. That may or may not be for you. After learning how to use it, I found it really wasn’t particularly bad. Having said that, my years spent with Arch were years ago - I’ve been on derivatives since because I don’t really want/need the level of control provided by installing Arch.
If you don’t want such a steep learning curve and are OK with some choices being made for you, maybe you want Manjaro, but given your comments so far, I’m not sure whether any Arch derivative is a good choice for you.
Maybe it’s just not how you like to do things. Even Manjaro says “hey check our weekly update thread” before you update, to see if you might need to intervene at update time, though IME you rarely do. (Ran Manjaro without a reinstall for years on one laptop.)
Currently I use EOS, and as the other post has said it kinda splits the difference. I had to do a little more setup for myself after an EOS install than a Manjaro install, and maintaining it is closer to maintaining vanilla arch, but I don’t consider it a timesink whatsoever. It will be until you know what you are doing.
I guess I take a little umbridge to your use of “timesink” as some kind of pejorative. Everything is a timesink until you know what you are doing with it, and less so when you do.
If you are curious, try them. If you are going to get upset and say they are trash the first time you need some sort of manual intervention, then probably it’s better for you to try/stay on some other distro, but it doesn’t happen often, and it’s usually easy (if you aren’t afraid of a wiki and the terminal) when it does.
If you want an argument, I’m not your guy, I’m just trying to answer the questions you seemed to be posing.