I saw that there were some controversies but honestly if I avoided everything in my life over every little bit of bad press or disagreement I would have nothing left to eat and nowhere to live.

The choices we make and the actions we take mostly come with compromises anyway; just because it’s on topic: Manjaro probably continued to function as you were used to and thus you didn’t see any reason to change that which “just works”. Which, I somewhat alluded to in my earlier comment with:

the continued use of Manjaro is at least justifiable.

Moving on.

I am not sure why any distro that attracts new users is an issue considering we want Linux as a desktop to keep growing as it improves the lives of all having both more users, contributors, and devs building software.

That’s not what I said, nor what I implied. What you just said assumes/implies that people start using Linux because they want to try Manjaro, which is just simply not the case. You might have mistaken Manjaro for Valve’s Steam Deck. Perhaps this chart does a better job at conveying my thoughts. As you can see, the search “install Manjaro” has for a considerable period in the last 5 years been more than half times as often searched as “install Arch”. By comparison, it just dwarfs the hits for “install EndeavourOS” and “install Garuda”. That’s the problem. To put it onto perspective, I’ll follow it up with charts for Ubuntu with its popular derivatives and Debian with its popular derivatives. I tried doing the same for Fedora and openSUSE, but their respective graphs just showed me why their derivates aren’t talked about that often 😅. Even Nobara is absolutely dwarfed compared to Fedora.