That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system.

That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users.

I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.

Yeah if you're looking for easy and risk free, yiu should stay with windows or mac. OTOH, if you want linux to stop being a black box, install arch. Just don't expect it to be your stable day to day workhorse with no effort.

I used Arch for ~9 years. I like it, but it absolutely isn't a good beginner distro, nor a good distro for people who just want to get on with life.

Mint (or Ubuntu) is a perfectly good alternative to Windows or Mac OS for an easy and "risk free" experience. Most people are perfectly satisfied with a black box OS.

Not that Mint has to be a black box at all. There's plenty of room for hacking around, if you're into that.