KubeRoot

Perhaps a better analogy is a painter who has no idea what their canvas is made out of; they know it’s a canvas, they know it’s for painting, they’re faintly aware they’re using some material stretched over a frame, but they just assumed a canvas is a canvas and they just never considered there might be other options than the one they’ve been getting.

The image in the comment mostly just feels hipster to me, and that would fit jumping on a currently trendy distro that’s also technically Arch. I don’t know if there’s more to it, it’s just a vibe thing for me.

Don’t take those memes seriously, I think the only bad thing I’d have about CachyOS is that it’s probably getting popularity as a trend, which doesn’t reflect on the distro itself.

In my particular personal opinion it seems like a good choice if you already know what you’re doing, since it’s mostly just Arch with a nice installer, which I consider to be a solid choice with good support.

Wouldn’t a real Gentoo user use a genuine IBM era Thinkpad?

I recommend starting with SysRq+E before that, there’s a chance it gets whatever the shutdown was waiting for. And if that fails… REISUB my beloved.