This was my opinion too. However like a year ago my best friend asked me: “Hey, I want to try linux. Which distro do you recommend?” I told him, that I recommend Linux Mint for beginners. And that I use Arch. Like a day later he wrote me again: “I’ve installed Arch, lol. Wasn’t that hard. The guide is actually very straight forward.”

This changed how I see Arch today. Arch isn’t super complex or hard to use. It’s just a bit more time consuming to set up. On the other hand it just works once set up.

If he’s a dev, he probably is able to follow this guide:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

The result is a system, that has virtually every package you can imagine in the aur, always the newest packages - which is quite important for gaming performance and a really slim system.

For the gaming part I recommend Gamescope:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope

As desktop Plasma is a good choice for beginners. However I personally use Sway.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#Plasma
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway

As positives for them ;)