There are plenty of ways to configure Linux to circumvent sudo. I’ve even seen people who log in as root by default. I do not, however, advise anyone to do that even if it’s just, as you put it, a Molly Guard. It has prevented me personally from doing catastrophic things to my system on a number of occasions.
Manjaro, because Arch-based, rolling release, but with a dev test cycle to try to eliminate breaking patches.