I love arch and I'm incredibly biased, but here goes. I have used Arch exclusively for the past n years. All of the things you've mentioned will work great. The AUR absolutely rules. It's rather similiar to Void in the sense that it's a completely blank slate, so it's going to be as unique an experience as you make it.

Arch is really stable and reliable as long as you don't break it, really. Out of the handful of times I've fucked up my install, all of them have been my own fault. Fortunately Arch is (relatively) easy to fix: keep a live USB on hand and chroot into your physical drive with arch-chroot and unfuck whatever needs unfucking. I haven't ever had to completely start over from scratch a single time. It's a learning experience!

Go for it, I say. Try it in a VM beforehand if you gotta.

Arch is bound to break every once in a while, that's just the deal you get with a rolling release distro. If stability is all you want, you can go with the BTRFS snapshots and hope to heavens this setup doesn't break or use something stable like Debian or Fedora.

I really enjoy using Garuda Linux. Arch based, using btrfs with snapshots preconfigured. Most beginner friendly arch based distro IMHO. I even prefer it to EndeavourOS. I use the KDE lite version tho, not big on their theming. Garuda is also my favorite rolling release.

IMHO arch is way too overrated. It does include a lot of stuff in the repos that others don't have, but the benefit end there in my opinion. My experience on fedora has been way better.

Definitely give it a shot, especially if you already know C. Getting your laptop set up the way you want can take some time at first but libinput makes it easy. I've never had issues with Arch on my desktop + lenovo thinkpad, and I update it two or three times a week. It's honestly surprisingly stable for a rolling release, unless you don't know what you're doing. There has been a couple times where I've messed up a binary file and had to arch-chroot in from the install medium in order to fix things. This was on me and a learning experience. The Archwiki documentation is the best source of information on the internet. I use it constantly. The AUR is never ceases to amaze me. It has nearly anything you need, even proprietary software. I am always amazed when some obscure legacy software that I need has already been compiled into a package build on AUR. The PKGBUILD files are concise and easy to understand in case you need to make changes to keep up with updated software.

Also it allows for complete control over every aspect of your desktop environment. It makes things so much easier. Despite what most people say I think systemd is great. You can easily view your services or daemons and have complete control. It makes using my OS a breeze and I am able to pump out scripts, or even run projects through hypervisors quickly and efficiently. I will likely never go back to another OS or distro for that matter, so dive in!

I've been using ubuntu based distros but now i use CachyOS and Vanilla Arch Linux, and even though I didn't want to admit it at first, it's a better but similar overall experience. the package manager with yay is just so much better than apt

I'm very biased, but try Gentoo. It's no harder to install than arch and has some very cool package management features, like USE flags.

My 2c would be yes only if you're specifically seeking out the bleeding edge and don't mind or enjoy doing the neccesary tinkering.

Alsp you have time in between now and a re-install I'd highly recommended trying to do you're day to day stuff in an Arch VM for a bit and see if it works for you.

No, go straight to MX Linux you'll have Nvidia driver, and luks/btrfs and snapshot etc OOB.