Big thing that people don't understand about Arch is that AUR is not part of distribution itself and package recipes there will break and mainteiners will go missing and arch won't care about them breaking.

Arch is extremely stable if you can read (this is not a joke). As in before doing system upgrade visit news and check if there is a need for manual steps during upgrade, you'llneed ro do something once or twice a year. And you actually need to read wiki and manual pages before doing things you aren't sure about.

As for manual step-by-step install, you can do it with almost any distro. For example you can partition disk, mount everything and install core packages using dnf --installroot=... from fedora live, same idea with debian based distros.