I discovered that EndeavourOS satisfied that for me, without me having to give up Arch. And snapper+btrfs-grub has eliminated any interest in messing about with the new line of immutable systems. The only tempting distro I might spend time in is Chimera Linux (link, b/c of an unfortunate naming conflict) which (a little hilariously) is an attempt to make a Linux distro that's purely Gnu-free. Chimera also runs dinit instead of systemd, and that's interesting.

Anyway, there are a couple of options that let a user stay in Arch but make things less... fussy.