Arch attracted a lot of newbies to the distro thanks to SteamOS being Arch based and CachyOS being extremely easy to get into and maintain, unlike the heavily gatekeepy “fuck off if you can’t solve literally everything yourself” base Arch. With that came a lot of demand for all sorts of packages that are not and will not be included in Arch/Cachy/whatever distro’s repos, prompting heavy AUR usage. As well as some people promoting the AUR as one of the benefits of Arch - “everything is on Arch”. And in my personal experience - Arch itself tends to drop a bunch of packages into AUR, and other 3rd party devs treat AUR as an easy distribution platform for Arch based distros, which gives AUR an undeserved amount of trust.
Arch attracted a lot of newbies to the distro thanks to SteamOS being Arch based and CachyOS being extremely easy to get into and maintain, unlike the heavily gatekeepy “fuck off if you can’t solve literally everything yourself” base Arch. With that came a lot of demand for all sorts of packages that are not and will not be included in Arch/Cachy/whatever distro’s repos, prompting heavy AUR usage. As well as some people promoting the AUR as one of the benefits of Arch - “everything is on Arch”. And in my personal experience - Arch itself tends to drop a bunch of packages into AUR, and other 3rd party devs treat AUR as an easy distribution platform for Arch based distros, which gives AUR an undeserved amount of trust.