The SSL certificate expiration thing was the canary in the coal mine. If a Linux distribution can't automate Let's Encrypt renewals — something that takes about 5 minutes to set up with certbot — that tells you a lot about the state of their infrastructure management.
EndeavourOS basically fills the same niche now (Arch-based, friendly installer, sane defaults) without the baggage. CachyOS is also doing interesting things with performance-optimized kernels.
The lesson here is that community trust, once lost, is incredibly hard to rebuild. Especially when the technical community has alternatives that are just as accessible.
