(No provocation)
I see these reasons:
- newbie
- lazy (don’t wanna edit config files etc.)
- unique features (like assistant/toolbox, some optimizations like in cachyos)
- wanna check how different systems are set up (that’s rather distrohopping)
Personally, I used manjaro i3 when I was beigginer and wanted to see how tiling WM should be configured (check out ranger config, for example). But after some time, I don’t see reasons why not to just customize pure arch (same with debian and debian-based distros).
I believe there are docker images for Arch? But those probably have some form of reproducibility, I should hope. Since you can’t install specific versions of packages declaratively with pacman unless you have physical access to the actual package file, I would not use it for a server. Maybe coupled with Guix or something? I dunno.
Maybe they need an environment with very up-to-date packages, or something along that vein. 🤔