Transprogrammer

Arch isn't necessarily about minimalism. It's about the distro not doing things for you and mostly leaving the defaults the way the upstream developers intended. So you DIY most of your distro, but you do it exactly the way you want. I very much do the exact same thing you just did for every work-issued macbook I've gotten in the past 10 years. Excepting, of course, the current one because the M3 isn't really usable in linux! Package groups are great for bigger things like DEs because they're developed together, so you get the entire experience the way the devs intended it. I think the only really big thing that's broken for KDE is Discovery, because pacman support isn't great there. It works fine for flatpack and others, though. Use it the way you want to!