Agreed. The normal pacman CLI does have a comparatively much higher learning curve though compared to e.g. APT. It’s not that hard to learn either but when you’re scrolling over a long-ass manpage, you do not immediately realize from the headers which whizz by in a flash that -S (alias for --sync) is for installing from repos, -Ss is for searching from repos, -S does not by itself “synchronize” with repos by pulling newest repo package metadata because well that’s not what we’re “synchronize”-ing with and you have to add the “y” flag, -Su (remember to add “y”!) is for upgrading all packages instead of -U (alias for --upgrade), and -U is for installing a local package. Compare that to the APT/dpkg system’s apt install, apt search, apt update, apt upgrade, and dpkg -i.

Admittedly APT does need one to get behind the fact that there are different commands and that “update” and “upgrade” are different, but that’s way less to remember (especially since apt is meant to be the interface for everything a user should do) compared to remembering pacman’s interesting definitions of database, query, sync, upgrade, and maybe files, while the only definition unlikely to be guessed with APT IIRC is update vs upgrade. You’re far more likely to need a pacman cheatsheet than an apt cheatsheet.

But in the end, let’s all love libalpm, and the actual code behind that pacman interface.