Apologies, hostility wasn't my intention, only seeking understanding.

Ya know, in the context of the software in a vacuum, sure. But I think I'll ammend what I said earlier about what constitutes a distro:

IMO, It's not just software that glues other existing software together into a contiguous OS, but also a staff, a community, a philosophy cast on that collection of software. A way of doing things and thinking about them. Decisions and the rationale for them, a history of iteration, user needs and how those needs are filled. Us soft squishy humans that make, maintain, modify, administer, use, and complain about the software.

Because I think that reducing a distro to only the software it produces or uses fails to paint the whole picture. The mechanisms used for managing the collection of software on any specific machine is only one part of a larger system.

Pacman isn't the only part of Arch, and Arch isn't just pacman. The same is true if you s/Arch/MSYS2/g on that statement.