Honestly I’ve found the opposite of what you said, where on Debian based distros I commonly had to go to a project’s git repo and follow readme instructions to build when it wasn’t in an apt repository. Meanwhile on arch, the only thing you have to install manually is yay and then afterwards everything is in the AUR. Not saying that makes arch more user friendly than Debian (obviously), but that one aspect I do actually find easier on arch at least if you’re willing to use an AUR helper.
Sometimes it makes me sad to think how much humor like this will be lost when time removes the context that enables it