To be fair, I would see why. Arch isn't that hard to install anymore so some people see Arch-based distros that are just Arch with GUI installer as useless. I use EndeavourOS just because GUI installer is more convinient to me.
Have you actually tried Manjaro or do you just listen to what other people say about it? I find it has no issues and have been daily driving it for like 3 years now. Just because something has negative hype doesn't mean it's as terrible as people say.
This website has a good summary of the problems with manjaro https://manjarno.pages.dev/ . I've used it too and it's usable from a user perspective, but it has so many underlying issues
I'm fully aware of the issues, but they've never impacted me personally and I'm not much of a distrohopper. If it ever borks my PC I'll probably switch.
I tried many times, though not recently and I agree with it being worse than just redundant. Sure, it's usable and maintainable, but it's objectively a bad idea.
You can just run vanilla arch, or one of the installers like Endeavor OS and just use BTRFS snapshots to counter breakages instead of Manjaro's delay thing managed by people I just cannot take very seriously.
GuixSD in tier-3? It uses the same tech as NixOS - store-based hierarchy, and functional, transactional package manager. The only thing that's different is the language - Guile Scheme is functional, acts as a convenient way for REPL as well as debugging the system, and eliminates additional scripting dependencies, while also being great for meta-programming. One language to rule them all. And yes, uses Shepherd instead of systemd. Want more GNU in your GNU/Linux? Guix is the thing. You can also probably boot using Hurd, but I've not tried that out.
I will not complain about the rest of them because I've not used them well enough. But I know that this tier-list is just bad. ClearLinux has a really good package manager - perhaps, the fastest of them all. And the rest of them are well, based on a root distro, and good for their specific use-case. Debian and Arch is also used for testing alternative non-Linux kernels. Alpine offers musl C instead of libc and Busybox instead of GNU coreutils+/-binutils.
I don't really care, for me "linux" is a kernel, a bunch of gnu utilities, and I take Xfce as desktop. I can use firefox? an editor? cmake? gcc? I'm in business.
All distros are the same. The main diff is apt/yum/pacman/etc. to distribute packages.