For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
That’s exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn’t really find this all that “hands on”. Sure it’s not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don’t get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying “advanced users only, DIY, etc” I’m thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It’s a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don’t really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.
Oh, yeah, for sure. AUR stuff is a somewhat more hands-on, at least if you actually read/edit PKGBUILD files the way you’re meant to, and it’s not too hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you’ve never had the guard rails off before, but yeah, pacman makes stuff easy.
“Advanced users only” these days seems to generally just mean, “CLI is a hard requirement” and maybe “you have to edit config files and not use a GUI” or (heaven forbid) “you may need to actually read and follow instructions”
