It is also first in the Distrowatch rank
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=cachyos
I distro hopped to it from Bazzite a couple of months ago, and I could not be happier.
If you try the installer, be careful when selecting multiples DE/WM as the conflicts were not listed anywhere for the installation process.
Picking a single environment and then adding the others later was what worked for me.
JSYK the differences are marginal between a vanilla arch install and cachy. You have you dig really deep to see any difference in performance.
iMO cachy is a good marketing arch distro.
You skipped over the fact that getting vanilla Arch installed is often what trips people up, and also what makes people who run vanilla Arch feel like they accomplished something and truly built something - because they did.
You’re also glossing over the fact that a lot of people run the CachyOS kernel even on vanilla Arch because of the performance gains from having a kernel specifically compiled for instructions your CPU supports.
In other words; I don’t think the convenience of a proper installer, nor even just a 5% gain in performance, is just “marketing”.
Bias disclaimer; I run CachyOS btw