Lemmy devs are being paid to develop Lemmy, they literally admit to it.

I’m called out, although I’m not quite in my 30s yet.

Also… Reddit started out in the same way, mostly as a forum for programmers and nerds

As a tech-savvy person, I tried a few of the easy-to-use ones like Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora. I didn’t really like them. I then tried Arch after taking a “Distro Selection Quiz”, thinking “ugh, there’s no way this will be good right?” and it absolutely hit every expectation I had of Linux. I love the feel that the OS is in my hands to be configured however I want it. I can use old and reliable systems or bleeding edge tech ideas.

Once you get past the installation you can always install Gnome or something like it anyway to make it just like the easy distros.