I agree on Cloudflare but never heard of their sponsorship. Just looked it up and if I got it right they and CDN77 are giving some of their paid CDN stuff CachyOS for free. I guess it means that the packages from Cachy repos will be proxied through Cloudflare for faster downloads but I don't know how big of an impact it has on user's privacy. Probably they can see our IPs, package names and whatever Pacman sends in it's queries, but they can't tamper anything considering there's a TLS encryption layer. I proxy my main browser through Tor, don't do much on the second one, and don't use a lot of packages, so I don't worry much :D So I guess they know at least my browser heh. Anyways I may be gravely mistaken and hope someone corrects me

Second this. Tried Cachy for gaming on PC and next week switched on laptop too. One word — speed. It's very performant and still stable. Never in 2 years had issue. And if you have Cachy has wonderful community forum where the problem is probably already solved or is in discussion. Arch base too is amazing letting you learn Linux at your pace without getting into bare-bones Arch install (which is nonetheless very useful). I'm on Gnome but Cachy have package kits for any modern DEs and even window managers. With that being said, Arch base + Cachy performance tweaks + variety of GUI configurations seems to me that there's a good chance it'll suit any your needs.