I don’t think there’s enough devices compromised to do an attack of this scale. Malicious packages were spotted quickly, and I’m sure they were reviewing all of them after this.

This is a job of a bad actor, since Dave2D’s video, attacks against Linux increased a lot, clearly, someone or some corp didn’t like what he shown.

There are plenty useful packages in the aur that you wont find in any distro, at least not the newest version (hyprland, AGS, waybar for example)

I hear you and do not disagree with anything you are saying. I have never really has issues with anything using to much memory on my mini pc which currently has 16gb of ram and i have never really noticed any slowdowns either I have 1tb nvme with a cheap intel n100 and I dunno why it runs so good I’m guessing my nvme is fast enough to not create a bottleneck. I run everything as flatpak or snap without issues on it. I do have a older laptop i never use that would probably like non flatpak options better since it seems slower then my mini and larger desktop but i’m guessing getting rid of its mechanical hard drive could speed it up but I doubt I ever spend the money on it. My mini currently has ubuntu and my browsers are currently brave and firefox both are snaps I have used librewolf flatpak in past but do not have it loaded currently. I’ve tried arch and other distros over the years. I currently have fedora on my larger desktop pc. I doubt I change anything on the cheap mini which I use on a large flatscreen. I even have the mini running the plex server snap and a mix of other things installed as flatpaks and snaps. The mini always seems fast with what I use it for the cpu never seems like it struggles. My mini is a fanless n100 that I added a usb fan that just sits on top and is basically the same dimensions. The mini I have had for over a year now running basically 24/7 without issues so far and I did use it without a fan for a while. I may get another for another tv and they have newer n cpu options available now.

Interestingly the same LibreWolf says about that:

— BEGIN —
Flatpak apps run sandboxed from the system via bubblewrap, which adds a layer of protection. But this prevents the browser from using its usual sandbox for process isolation.

Processes are still isolated through nested seccomp filters.

Flatpak supports process isolation via flatpak-spawn, which zypak and the unofficial Chromium Flatpak use. This would cause a big increase in memory use in Firefox/Librewolf though, so it is not a viable solution.
— END —

I for some time also used Ungoogled Chromium as a flatpack and it was very unusual experience so personally still prefer normal apps in general, if there is no direct intention to sandbox something (I don’t remember if it used more memory than just not sand boxed Chromium, I remember that both used more than enough)

makes sense but I would probably still just grab it from flathub since that is one of there offical sources since I would probably just avoid aur but that is just my personal opinion.

I suppose (hasn’t used Arch too much, yet) it is used as an official source as well, for example:
https://librewolf.net/installation/arch/

So probably use of official references within should be fine, just searching in “public” repository for something can be not the best idea, or should be done very cautiously…