Well, I dug a bit deeper. Strange that the PKGBUILD does not build properly on any Arch ARM architecture (armv7 or aarch64). When I fire up a fresh RPi image, wget works as expected. Do not know what is wrong, but it does not seem to be right...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pi@raspberrypi:~ $ wget --force-html --spider --connect-timeout=1 --timeout=10 --tries=2 https://www.google.com/
Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
--2022-06-28 13:59:39-- https://www.google.com/
Resolving www.google.com (www.google.com)... 142.250.190.100, 2607:f8b0:4009:805::2004
Connecting to www.google.com (www.google.com)|142.250.190.100|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Remote file exists and could contain further links,
but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 5.15.32-v7+ #1538 SMP Thu Mar 31 19:38:48 BST 2022 armv7l GNU/Linux')
hopefully a dev will see this.