I will say that I’ve never had an issue with weird partitioning or filesystems on ubuntu or similar distros either, even if I wanted to get really exotic there is usually still an option to drop to a shell and do that part by hand.

oh yeah, there's always a way to work around it, but with Ubuntu et al, you're perpetually working around the system. it was genuinely pleasant to switch to Arch and just have the flexibility to do what I liked without having to figure out what odd customizations got piled on top in nonstandard ways. for most people this doesn't matter but as someone who hasn't used anything but a linux system in decades, Arch was a breath of fresh air.

I kinda like the idea of Nix (honestly I don’t know what to think about it but it seems neat), but I don’t have the free time to jump into it and I don’t think I could get the buy in to use it at work unfortunately

if you have a specific way you want your systems set up, Nix is nice. the configuration language will take some time to get used to though. it's just plain weird and there's no shortcut for it.

It comes down to audience. Arch is niche and caters to a specific crowd, as does Ubuntu, Debian, etc. The problem in Linux spaces is some internet tough guys actually think lesser of you for not being in the target audience of Arch, despite the fact everyone should have their computing needs catered to.