The arch install guide doesn't teach you to make dotfiles

Skimmed through it, should work

It invites a steady major release cadence

Sounds like a raspberry thing

The only real alternative to an embedded scripting language is lua, and too few prefer it over js. Lots of internals in gnome-shell is also written in js, allowing the scripting language to hook straight into the api and data structures without a plugin interface.

In a distant future everything is we assembly, with typed stable interfaces for plugins. But the might happen in gnome 8

Because matrix is slow and xmpp is dead