Arch is simple, but not easy.
Other distros might be easy, but not simple

I mean, have you seen archinstall? its pretty easy and straightforward. Unless you have a phobia against terminal screens.

You'd like to think people just do this to assholes, but the number of innocent noobs that get recommended Arch is too damn high.

everything is simple once you know how to do it. i think a lot of the arch recommenders likely don’t realize how difficult some of these things can be the first time. it’s the same with any kind of specialized knowledge i think. it’s one of the reasons why teaching can be difficult. but the arch community has been super helpful in my experience

The worst part about "simple" is defining what that means for the person. Depending on what they mean, there are a lot of different answers.

(And a good chunk of those are just Debian with different branding).

As others have said, EndeavourOS is pretty damn easy too. Personally I'll stick to Arch for desktop, deb stable for servers/lxc's, and deb sid for mostly screwing around and sending some reports in so stable can be stable.

Why not just direct them to Gentoo?

well it is simple, but you also gotta be competent as per the wiki :P

It's fairly well documented and the up to date packages are very convenient.

It can also be pretty confusing installing debian and having to find how to install packages that aren't out of date.

Imo take a few hours to power through the wiki installation guide and it's really not too bad + you're equipped to fix issues as they arise. It's not Gentoo. When Ubuntu breaks for a new user, it's a nightmare too.

So I think I disagree, it's been easier to use than Fedora, Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Elementary in my experience. I use Gentoo too but that is indeed simple in the challenging sense.

Arch is a nice middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo.

Plus, with EndeavourOS users can have their cake and eat it too.

I mean, it is dead simple after all

Manjaro was my "throwing into the water"-distro and it worked very well getting me swimming. YMMV.

Oh yeah, it's the community thinking about switching frustrated by the Linux culture that are unfriendly, not the Linux community itself being incredibly unwelcoming to anyone who doesn't "get it."

I mean as long as it's elementary OS that might be okay