so that still counts, right?

Still counts. You now have to say you use arch every hour, otherwise you'll implode.

manjaro has had a lot of drama and problems in the past and i don't think it's really a good distro to use. they forgot to renew their ssl certificate multiple times, they break software due to their weird update strategy (they use custom repos which hold back updates mostly arbitrarily for a week) which breaks dependencies and sometimes breaks the entire system, and their gui package manager once overwhelmed the AUR with traffic.

a better alternative with an easy gui installer would be endeavouros or cachyos. endeavour is basically manjaro except competent and with regular arch packages. cachy has its own repos (in order to build specialized versions of packages), but it keeps in sync with the regular arch repos.

though of course if manjaro is working for you that's great and any amount of linux use is good. manjaro is just a bit temperamental. i also understand that some people can't just distrohop, for example because they don't have a separate home partition, or not enough space to copy important files elsewhere before wiping their partitions.

No, it doesn't count. You only get BTW privileges after installing Arch at least once.

Oh did they renew their ssl certs so their repos work now?

Lol I cannot understand how anyone can trust those idiots at this point.