I've tinkered at most an hour on my arch install and it's just been running smoothly. The installer these days is easy to go through as well. It's the same for bash, very little customization, then it runs smoothly for years.

I'm not saying CachyOS is bad, just that it is in my opinion another layer of complexity that may change/deprecate/etc.

>I used to spend countless hours tinkering with arch but then I got older and don’t have much time.

Have your lost your old configs that you worked hard on? That's a shame if so. I love moving my configs I've worked hard on to new machines and instantly getting up and running in a now-familiar environment. It saves so much time and effort.