I don’t think it was necessarily harder. It was different, maybe simpler.

First off, the Arch Wiki had a more straightforward “Installation Guide” compared to the current one. The previous one had more detailed steps in the guide itself, compared to the current one which has links on certain sections to different tools. As an example, partitioning a drive using parted was part of the “Installation Guide” back then, and it gave you an example layout for MBR and EFI layouts in the article itself; whereas the current guide now gives you a link to the “Partitioning” page, which itself has links to the various tools (parted, fdisk, gdisk, etc), which in turn have command and layout examples.

You also gotta consider that drivers were different back then, too. AMD’s offerings were not as great back then as they are now, so sometimes, depending on your card, you’d have to install different drivers, kinda like how things are right now with NVIDIA. Now the opposite is also kinda/sorta true with Intel. Newer (read: Kaby Lake and above) require an external package to be installed to enable certain features like proper hardware acceleration.

Lastly, you now have hundreds if not thousands of videos on YouTube of guided installations for Arch. The quality of said videos might vary from video to video, but nevertheless they’re resources that people use.

Ultimately I don’t think it’s that Arch used to be harder, it’s more so that the landscape of Linux and its community has changed. Some things have changed for the better, others for the worse. Things are just “different.”