It should probably start with WTF is Omarchy.

I recently moved my gaming desktop to CachyOS from Manjaro, but I have no idea what Omarchy is or whether or not I want it, and there's not a single link in the README.

Guess I'll go look it up.

Omarchy is an “opinionated” Arch distro by dhh of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp/Hey fame

Ah, thanks for explaining (and the rest of the thread for clearing up the "not a distro" part).

Kinda reminds me of some of the NixOS configs I created to pre-configure workstations for me when I was tinkering with NixOS, a "desktop configuration in a bottle" sort of thing.

Makes sense for Arch I think since a lot of the time getting it ready for your task is a often more than "just install the package you need" as it is on other distros; the main reason I switched to Arch distros when I lost the energy to configure it myself for each new piece of hardware (laptops with media keys especially).

Its not really a distro, nor does it pretend to be. What it really is, is an Arch Linux install, with a preconfigured set of apps & workflow, and a set of tools to easily allow the user to customise to their preferences - within the confines of the original config/workflow.

Basically, it's a "curated Arch linux"

So it could just be some files and a bash script or maybe better, an Ansible recipe??? Sorry for being reductionist but its late and I'm out of beer.

That's essentially what it is. They don't really pretend otherwise. The iso is a convenience for 1 stop installs.