"There are still many things I need to set up on the new laptop, for example: suspension/hibernation on closing the lid doesn’t always work"
For me, this is one of those things that should work out of the box. I appreciate Arch is one of those distros you configure manually, and can thus choose whether to implement this or not. But I'd rather not have my laptop burn out in my bag because the system didn't suspend properly.
I'm sure everyone has experience of this happening on any distro, and probably even on Windows and MacOS. But it should at least try out of the box in my mind.
Yeah if you want any semblance of anything working 'out of the box', arch is just not for you.
There is no default install on arch. There is not even an installer. There's just the command line on a live system and then you create the partitions and put all the files in place automatically.
It's really great that arch exists but it's just not for everyone.