It gets better!
I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.
Eventually you figure out the "core" (that stays the same everywhere and you don't have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.
It's big and complicated because you're replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.
Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.
Edit: I also don't like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.
I like fuzzel, had a few issues with dpi scaling on wofi out of the box.
Easy to integrate clipboard/window select/dmenu binds and a way to distinguish indexed entries from straight text was a plus.
Honestly unless you're going out of the box to something new (Walker and anyrun caught my eye) dmenu has had everything I needed for years... But I don't want to set it up again. Not again.