100% I can imagine they don’t want to rely on third parties to develop their distribution, but, realistically, all the software that keeps the system going will be developed by “randos on the internet” still, so might as well hand over all the development effort to who has the knowledge already, while providing funds/grants
Appimage doesn’t do deduplication where possible like Flatpak does, where did you get the idea that Flatpak packages are bigger?