People distro hop all the time for out of the box experience. Very few enjoy configuring their desktop to perfection, because frankly it's a huge PITA with everything being split between a thousand control panels and config files with differing conventions and levels of documentation.

When a distro with a default configuration close to what some group of users is looking for shows up, that's exciting to that group because it's that much less fiddling they need to think about, and perhaps most importantly it's not going to randomly break on them one day because it's represented in the distribution's testing.

It's mostly a PITA on Linux because once you do things yourself they will eventually break and you're the one who will have to figure out how to solve it via your own custom setup again. Similar to Vim templates it saves a lot of time joining a community build.

Claude Code really helped me with this recently. I have a rather old dotfiles repository (10+ years) for my Arch system, and I can really feel the fatigue from updating and maintaining it. So much so that over the years, it has accumulated many minor annoyances that I never fixed. Nowadays, I can simply explain these issues to an LLM, and it will mostly resolve them.