I knew I couldn’t be the only one thinking of another HL3 when I saw the image :)

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.

For most consumers it might not, the amount of nvidia propaganda advertisement in games is huge.

You know you do. And even more, because it’s gonna be a cute kitty!

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.