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Personally, I use pacman when possible and flatpak when it's not. I try to avoid the aur as I have had too many problems with missing dependencies or version conflicts. Plus, I don't generally need things that are not in the repositories so it rarely comes up.
"But flatpaks are not lean!" While this is true, I find flatpaks don't break my system. Flatpaks do use more resources, from storage to RAM, but I have plenty of both so it's not really a concern.
I use yay, as it comes by default with EndeavourOS. It's basically an AUR helper that uses pacman and works quite the same.
Flatpak is a different package manager and has nothing to do with your system packages. They are not exclusive, I use both. So what you basically asking isn't which package manager people use, but rather which package format.
I just reinstalled arch last weekend and have both paru and yay installed. Only real difference between them is yay is Go and paru is Rust. Both work great and very similarly. I think the paru dev originally worked on yay.
I tend to choose the pacman and aur over flatpaks or snaps, something about the isolation layer never sat right with me.
Why do you have both paru AND yay installed at the same time? As someone who likes Rust, I maybe should have switched to paru too. But I just can't justify the change, because yay comes preinstalled and works just fine, and paru seems to not offer anything worthwhile the change.
Pacman plus the AUR is the move on Arch based distros. The AUR gives you access to basically everything, and paru or yay handles the build chain without pain. Flatpak has its place for apps that ship messy runtime dependencies, but for most things it adds an unnecessary isolation layer. Have you tried paru as your AUR helper yet?
I sometimes prefer Flatpak over AUR, because I do not trust everyone on the AUR to run scripts with root rights on my system. At least Flatpaks are a bit sandboxed (even if the sandbox is an illusion) and the programs don't install and run with root rights. Sometimes the Flatpak is from the original developer and the script in AUR is not. Or the AUR script is not updated well and often enough, unlike day one Flatpak updates. But Flatpaks do not integrate well in your system and applications can look out of place too. There is a lot to consider, besides what you already mentioned.
I use both, prefer the AUR in optimal cases.
Always use native pkgs if possibile (so use pacman/paru)
I don't like Flatpak, so that makes it an easy choice for me. Flatpak apps never quite integrate properly
I like having Flatpaks as a fallback option, but if something is available in the arch repos, aur or chaotic-aur, I'll always go there first
Look into the Chaotic AUR. It offers pre compiled AUR programs. Almost every app I really need has been there. If it's not in there and I really need it and will get used often I'll get it from the AUR.
I dont really like flatpaks much. I'll use it if it's easy and I dont plan on using the app much. Apps like Bottles. They are nice to have but rarely do I use it.
What do you mean by "bloated"? How many more bytes does the flatpak version have compared to its counterpart?
Depends on the program, they don't use system libraries so if they have a lot of dependencies then they'll be larger.
An example:
Steam Flatpak: 35MB
Steam pacman: 19MB
On one hand, it's only a few MB. On the other hand, it's 54% larger.
Flatpaks can also depend on other flatpaks. For example, graphics card support requires about 1-1.5GB of flatpak dependencies even though your system already has graphics card drivers.
I just don't understand how people still use Flatpak.
Once I had to download a small app 400kB more or less, and suddenly it started downloading 200MB of environment packages.
Never again.
If you install yay, it gives you pacman + AUR wiþout sudo. To be pedantic, þere is a sudo happening, but it's hidden. In any case, you don't ever type "sudo" and it is one command. I expect oþer yay-like tools are similar.
Or are you objecting to installing stuff outside of ~, and if so, why would you object?