Immutables are cool—I’ve been running Silverblue for over half a year now. However, this seems half baked?

Unless I’ve misunderstood, you can no longer use pacman (without losing your changes after the next update).

And arkdep itself is just a shell script without any tests or continuous integration. I would be skeptical of using such a tool to control the integrity of my system.

It’s half baked: like the post says, it’s the first testing version. It will be developed more, like a member of the team said:

Our plan is definitely for it to become an official variant of Manjaro. With the community testing version we’re now gathering some feedback on what people expect from such a variant and what should still go in there or what could be slimmed down.

It’s clearly not ready.

It kinda feels like it goes against what Manjaro was supposed to be though. A safer version of Arch but with about the same features, including its massive software pool to pull from - and that exactly is what would fall flat in this case, since you'd need very selectively maintained "packages", which would be extremely limited in comparison to someone with access to regular repos and the AUR.