I don’t think Void should be used by normies, it is a fairly advanced distro and has less documentation than arch. It used to have documentation, but it was hard to maintain, so everything was moved to the handbook and the maintainers recommended you go to arch and gentoo wikis, which is fine, the info doesn’t need to be duplicated, but you need to know what to run and how to properly read the wikis.
Void has been the most stable distro I ever used. But my uses for server setups have had me run into deep limitations of runit / the whole daemon-tools way of doing things. I’ve started a migration procedure on the L1T forum to s6 stack (s6-rc and s6-init) and I’ve been very happy, but I’m not happy about the use of github (I wish Void devs were using something more open, like codeberg, or their own forgeo instance).
Don’t go to r*ddit, go to libera-chat, people are more open there. In general, discussions about systemd aren’t welcome, unless you really understand some concepts and you have used it in an advanced way. I used to make my own or edit the systemd unit files (systemctl edit name.service) and I only barely touched the surface. But systemd’s built-in dependency resolution is still better than having to run sv check in the runit service, which, if it gets updated from the repo, you’re in for some fun (although it’s not as bad, you can copy the service in /etc/sv and symlink the actual name in /etc/runit/runsvdir/default, pointing to the copy, that way, your service doesn’t get deleted or overwritten).
As a base distro, void is still good, but there’s quite a few things that are wrong with it, from a user perspective and from a distro maintenance perspective. The s6 creator put it well, runit requires a lot of scripts during the init stage, before runit even starts, that need to be maintained (just check out /etc/runit/core-services). In systemd land, this is fixed with services and proper dependency resolution. s6 does the same, in a way saner fashion (and in parallel, as much as possible).
Nobody is asking you to learn vim here, but this is the same as saying “this distro doesn’t come with m*crosoft word” - which, as you can tell, wouldn’t be something that needs to be shipped. That said, you can easily install nano as a first step in your setup, then focus on other things that require a text editor, like changing your repo mirror.
The xbps-src build system is cool if you need to compile a program that isn’t available in the repo, but has its issues (q66, the dev of Chimera Linux pointed that out, who used to be the maintainer of the unofficial void-ppc port, now deprecated). For me, personally, it was a bit of a horror show. Things like libreoffice can’t be cross-compiled. As someone who used a RPi 4 as my main PC, I really wanted to have that and the only way was through xbps-src (because it wouldn’t be available in aarch64 or aarch64-musl repos), but then, you’d be met with compilation errors, due to x86 java crap being bundled in the LO build (I don’t think it’s the xbps-src maintainer’s of LO template fault, I think it was just LO, but debian fixes that on their end, so… idk).
I still use xbps-src to create the s6 packages needed (I updated some of the templates on my local mirror and also had to create new ones, for missing packages, like s6-linux-init). I’m not a developer by any means, so if something doesn’t compile, I’m stuck. Thankfully, all things skarnet are basically impossible to not compile.
I don’t generally invite people to use void, unless I see them to be knowledgeable enough. Once you get into it, it’s hard to let go, if you’re just a basic user. The distro’s very stable. Sometimes you might get your setup messed up, like the upgrade from pipewire-media-session to wireplumber, but that’s not entirely Void’s fault (the former wasn’t a stable solution anyway) and more than just Void was affected. But the way to set it up had you kinda do the grunt work. Which is fine with me, but I doubt it would be ok with most people, which is why I don’t recommend void to just anyone.
As a distro, it appears pretty user-friendly at first, even if you just got into using the terminal, but it’s more like a shallow beach going deeper and deeper as you get further away from the shore.