I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy shit because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
The AUR is the best thing about Arch. yay -Syu and everything is updated. Painless.
I tend to use binary packages to avoid long compiles. If an update includes something that is going to take a while, I often exclude that package from the update. After everything else is updated, I can run it again to get the last package or two. They can just run in the background while I do other stuff. If it is a program I am going to use right away, I may put off the update of that package until I am done my session. This is pretty common with JetBrains updates for example.
I do not have a single Flatpak.