It’s racist because it’s racist. It has historically been used in a racist manner, and that’s socially recognized. So, if you do it now, it’s interpreted as racist.
(Much like the swastika is a hate symbol because the swastika is a hate symbol. It has been used as such and now it’s socially recognized as such (even though there’s nothing inherently bad about a bunch of geometric lines (and, in fact, was a positive symbol for the first 5,000 years of its use)).)
I added the repos to my existing arch install sometime last year I think. It’s pretty seamless in that regard, I think I only ran into a mirror sync issue once, and it was resolved a few hours later.
My CPU supports the v4 packages, but I’m not really sure how much benefit there is for most things. (And things like tf/torch aren’t coming from the repos anyways.)
I also use their kernel. I can feel a difference between stock and zen or stock and cachyos, but I don’t think I’d be able to tell zen and cachyos apart tbh.
I definitely wouldn’t switch distros for it, but since it’s a trivial, drop in repo, I’ll keep using it.
Adding another organization isn’t ideal trust-wise of course.
Regarding the second point: applications change it. It’s really annoying. I think Discord and Zoom both do it.
https://xkcd.com/2929/