That amount of money a month is extremely substantial for an open-source project, and especially for a non-corporate distro. It also far exceeds previous years.
The pressure mostly seems to be from adding wayland support to Cinnamon, combined with perhaps maintaining more projects at too regular an interval than their team can chew.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I'd much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I'd also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.