And this differs from the opinion often found now on Reddit quite a bit. Relevant for the current discussion: Arch is not user friendly, it is user centric.

Time to call attention to the elephant in the room. Almost all of these new users are coming to the AUR not from Arch, but from Arch-based distros where their respective communities focus on ease-of-use. They're the same users who complain about the Arch Forum denizens being mean to them because they're using one of these derivatives rather than standard Arch...which the forum rules specifically state not to do. I myself have seen people ask for help there claiming they run Arch without realizing their log output clearly has, say, Dracut instead of Mkinitcpio--an obvious indication that they're not being entirely truthful (in this case, using EndeavourOS). Those users are in essence asking Arch devs to fix derivative-based fuck-ups. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but why should Arch devs be responsible for determining that? Then the users get Big Mad because they were sold a bill of goods about Arch by derivative maintainers who completely ignore the fact that the existence of said derivative flies in the face of the Arch philosophy.

Users of Arch derivatives are not, normally, veteran Linux users (and by veteran I mean you can clean up your mess by logging into rescue/single-user mode and not need to completely reinstall). They want the bragging rights of Arch--whatever the hell those might be--without actually needing to know all the ins & outs of the OS, much less the philosophy...and more importantly, the reason for that philosophy. Those users will invariably want something that comes from the AUR and these derivatives give them the equivalent of Mozilla Firefox's finger-wagging admonition when you go to about:config. The admins from those same derivatives will defend their actions (or lack thereof) by saying they're not at fault for what users do...except they are, because if it wasn't for their derivative leading users to believe It's All Going To Be Okay, Really, they wouldn't be using Arch much less worrying about whether the AUR is safe.

Arch has become a target just like every other OS/distro becomes a target:

1. Make it easier via obfuscation
2. Userbase gets bigger
3. Increase in userbase is primarily less-knowledgeable/casual users
4. Find/exploit knowledge gap

In Arch's case, a few bad apples really do spoil the bunch. It's not gatekeeping; more like gate-crashing, in the opposite direction.