Personally I don't ever use an Arduino board as a programmer. And certainly I can't and don't recommend that to anybody else - except maybe in case of emergency or for the purpose of learning. Excellent dedicated programmers are widely available for little money, certainly for less than getting another Arduino board. These are things you can rely upon.
There are quirks depending on the kind of Arduino hardware you have, the type of bootloader that is on there, the version of the IDE you use (serial buffer size!) and so on. Nobody really wants to deal with all of that. And it is certainly not easier or more user friendly for beginners either. It is a sad mess.