Here’s my journey from arch to proxmox back to arch: https://bower.sh/homelab
I was in your shoes and decided to simplify my system. It’s really hard to beat arch and I missed having full control over the system. Proxmox is awesome but it felt overkill for my use cases. If I want to experiment with new distros I would probably just run distrobox or qemu directly. Proxmox does a lot but it ended up just being a gui on top of qemu with some built in backup systems. But if you end up using zfs anyway … what’s the benefit?
I’ve never used bcachefs and only recently read about some of the drama. I wish the project the best but at this point it is hard to beat zfs