I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.
Install as much as possible via flatpak
Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)
That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.
Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though... so... not sure how much benefit I'm really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That's something...