Doing it yourself is fine as an educational exercise for newbies, but skilled linux users generally have better things to do than to do the setup by hand for the nth time. On the other hand the “vanilla”/bleeding-edge approach of Arch makes it one of the best bases for derivative distros available, so basing your distro on it is a no-brainer for many.

“Manjaro is not stable because it ensures no breaking updates are pushed to users” is such a weird statement to make.

The problem with the line of thinking that this is some sort of deception or a trap, is that none of what is happening here is working towards anything. You simply can’t do surprise troop movements in the age of GEOINT, nor are intelligence agencies so single-minded you could “distract” them with a fake coup, nor does this have any effect on the current Ukrainian offensive. The supposed trap is missing the “trap” part.

The features themselves are very useful for basically any user. Whether they are worth the non-standardness and issues that come with it is another question.

I’ve read reports stating that it was hit by both/a mixture. Ultimately what hit them isn’t that important.

Twitter probably opened the floodgates when they managed to shaft users and cut API access without outright killing themselves. Now everyone else is emboldened to ask “why can’t we do that too?”.