

It sounds simple and not at all mental gymnastics - they encountered this issue with a minor thing, started reading up on it online, and when digging into that kind of stuff ended up reading on what the legal situation is with discriminating based on it in general, finding out that companies can discriminate when hiring.
If anything, I’d say half of the post is maybe irrelevant, since you don’t need the backstory of how OP ended up looking into it, but it seems to be a reasonable recounting of events.
It’s not being made “as painful as possible”, it’s just manual. Arch isn’t a distro that’ll preconfigure things for you so everything’s plug’n’play, it’s a distro that’ll give you access to everything and the power to use it however you like, but with that comes the expectation and responsibility to manage those things.
Installing arch manually is simply a good lesson in how your system is set up, what parts it’s made up of, in part because you’re free to remove and switch out those parts.
And sure, there’s no magic bullet to make sure a new user understands everything they did, but I think in the end, if you’re not willing to read, learn and troubleshoot, you might just want a different distro.