Great advice. I had specific apps I have or was planning to research, but it would probably behoove me to double check everything.
A live USB is advice I hadn't considered. I've done that several times, and I've done a handful of VMs, but I never considered it might help sus out some potential hardware issues.
I've actually practiced setting up Arch in a VM, and while I got everything to work just fine, I think pure Arch is just not for me. Something Arch-based would be okay, like BlendOS, but I don't get that nice feeling of accomplishment in pure Arch from tinkering with every little system config file and dependency—just annoyance and exasperation.