Found this to be an interesting versus blog and wanted to know other people's thoughts.

Haven't tried either but, installing Arch isn't hard anymore so Manjaro would just be a useless middleman. I struggled with it a few years ago, but on my most recent attempt, I found the archinstall cli tool that comes with it, and it pretty much does everything for you.

Neither.

Just use CachyOS instead. It's Arch in fucking fast, without introducing any weird deviations like Manjaro did(or still does?), rock solid and stable, while everything you may know from Arch can be applied, still. No real need to use their tools, but why not?

They work, and don't break things.

Their defaults were sane at time I tried it, which were BTRFS over one single device without further partitioning (except for 2GB 'small' boot), systemd-boot and Plasma/KDE.

It's still running like that, for about two years now. From that same installation.

Maybe the experience can be different with different paths chosen, or different hardware. Can't be known without trying it.

Did I mention fast? How about ultra-smooth?