This. I can’t afford reliable always-on storage now, but I plan to build for SSDs rather than HDDs because I don’t have a separate room to put it into.

I do agree, I’m just not surprised it wasn’t done this way at the start and I’m not bothered enough by it to want a change.

AFAIK, arch never pretended to cater to new linux/cli users, I’ve always read it as a recommandation for advanced (or at least comfortable with reading docs and using CLI) users.
My first time using arch required me following the arch wiki for install and when I finally got a working system (I’m as bad at following tutorials as I am at following cooking recipes) the pacman commands were not something I struggled with.
But yeah coming from Debian where I had the gloriously intuitive apt syntax, I get your point.