if a distro becomes really really popular is inevitable that sooner or later some kind of corporation will put it’s hands on it.
Not how it works. And more so in general if you’re interested and curious do some reading on copyleft licenses. It’s truly a marvelous thing and they work quite well at keeping projects open.
I know Fedora is mostly just Gnome, but you can’t deny it’s probably the best implementation of it in any distro.
I absolutely can, what. It’s about the same as all other distros that don’t add much or at all to the upstream version.
And Arch is definitely not easy to install for a newbie.
If you are interested in trying it some time, once you’re in the installer type “archinstall”. It’s a default installation script that makes it easy to install. There isn’t nearly as much upkeep as the memes would suggest.