I don't really like endeavourOS, seems like that it points more towards user friendliness than performance, which is not what I'm aiming to. I will probably install base arch, get familiar with it and then select some packages from either cachy or guarda to improve performance.

That's what I think I'm going to do, probably the best approach

I didn't really think about your last point, in fact a big distro like arch will probably never die, while, just how we saw with arcolinux, these smaller distros with smaller development teasm can die in the future.

I understand, but less packages means it's easier to manage my system. One of the reasons I'm leaning towards arch is because of its minimal approach, so that I can install only what I need.