It turn into mandriva when mandrake bought conectiva amid a legal battle for the name with a comic books company, owners of the character Mandrake.
The last version was launched in 2011, and the company closed in 2015. Their most prominent derivatives were Open Mandriva, Mageia, PC Linux, and Rosalinux.
Mageia was founded with most of the developers from mandriva (or so Wikipedia says)
Basically Mandrake Linux became Mandriva linux in 2005, then in 2011 the distro was killed due to financial problems, but the community decided to continue the distro, creating OpenMandriva Lx. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMandriva_Lx
I understand your point but if you end up on their forum through searches, it's pretty clear that the majority of participants are the loud ones, making it irrelevant how many quiet ones aren't participating. You're just reading a topic between someone needing help and a group of people trolling them because they can.
I've been using arch for 2 years and I've been regularly using the forum to troubleshoot issues. The vast majority of posts, at least from what I have seen and experienced were just of people trying to troubleshoot the issue, asking for command outputs, providing suggestions or just wiki links to people who have missed things in the installation or forum links if the issue was solved previously. Sure there might have been some toxicity in some threads, but that's bound to happen in an open forum.
Maybe I'm super lucky but that's my experience with the platform. Most of the toxicity I've encountered on the internet when it comes to arch and Linux in general was on reddit and lemmy, where people just try to push other distros down and make their own look superior.
The solution I’ve sort-of found is to go to communities of Arch-based systems instead of Arch itself. The same solution should work in most cases*, and the communities are more newbie-friendly.
*Depends on how close to Arch the distro is in this aspect/subsystem. The Manjaro community is probably less likely to offer AUR based solutions, since the AUR can be unreliable/unsafe on Manjaro.