Not seen this done manually before. Neat idea!

Try setting your vpn to listen on UDP, port 53 (usually used by DNS. If that fails, it’s going to be some sort of deep packet inspection, yes.

If you migrate to it, I promise we’ll shut up.

I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

This is the correct answer. Pig-headed arrogance is why this cancer of a framework exists.