If there’s one thing we learned from COVID, it’s that the best way to get rid of a virus is by soap and water.

Yes. And this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction from them. They’ve been working on a CentOS clone ever since Red Hat decided to make it more unstable and cutting edge. So it’s quite natural for them to step in and do this.

This is an excellent suggestion, but be mindful that suse is an RPM-based distribution and upgrades will necessarily install slower than other formats. If that’s not a problem (just run updates via cron) then it’s fine.

Pacman is not a good package manager; if something goes wrong during the install it can leave your system in an unstable state. A better package manager would be one that has transactional updates.