If it's a cheap, why hasn't someone else done this at this consistency? Where are the other distros easily applying a theme to basically everything on your system for example? It ships a custom theme builder Aether, Quickshell to build desktop ui elements, a new launcher and its own cli.

Fans attached to ideology and silliness. I don't care if people like it or not, $8m is a ridiculous sum of money for this.

I assure you there are legions of nixos users doing similar things but getting fully custom configs on the other end

Your straw man is rather weak. Would you like to try again? This isn't a distro. Distros build software, maintain packages, fix bugs, support kernel versions.

The $8m would have been better spent on giving it to Arch directly than this grifty pretty face.