Not really. Whoever created these distros had a specific vision they wanted to achieve. Debian is one thing, Arch is another. The world is richer for having both.
Debian and Arch are different enough that the argument isn't about them. The issue is the 100's of distros that could be replaced with just "install <major distro> and do apt install X" (or some other trivial thing like changing the default to KDE instead of Gnome).
90% of distros' "visions" is ultimately just providing a general-purpose desktop/laptop OS. There's indeed an insane amount of wasted effort, both on developers' part but also users (skill portability is an issue because no 2 Linux distros/machines are alike).
