There is at least one more scenario: Users who have "comfortable resources" and use demanding applications, but want the underlying OS to be as small, easy to understand, and easy to manage as possible.
I'm a user in the above category. I need some big apps (e.g., Brave, Thunderbird, Libreoffice, Gimp) but the size and complexity of today's mainstream distros is NOT OK as far as I'm concerned.
A lot of big apps run just fine on TCL.
Thanks for your feed-back. I was such a user (chasing for the underlying OS to be small), I did manage to understand it (at some time in the past,
job done!). But "easy to manage as possible" became complex when we involve more and more complexity (UEFI, close-source firmware, wayland, pirewire, etc).
Ex1: I mean we just lean about sound in kernel as OSS v3, then come ALSA, then pipe-wire. And all my knowledge become wasted.
Ex2: just learn to tweak up Xorg server + drivers, then Wayland types come and we need Xwayland etc.
Ex3: small/ effective drivers for sound/gpu/wifi/bluetooth, but now they need firmware.
I could go on and on. So today
easy to manage is "integrated tools" (instead of shell scripts). Ex: In KDE the burden is on developers and me/user just use them. It comes a time when you just want to enjoy driving a car, not daily repair it.
But today my biggest concern is the fast step (temporary for maybe 1 year peak) of A.I. discovering bugs (some intentional by national agencies) in kernels + drivers etc. And fast/prompt corrections involve a big team of developers, so the bet is (temporary) on big distro clean-up their shit, then followed by small /passionate distro.