Not sure yet on any of this part. Part of the reason we went down that path is because brew on the host was not an option. But now if you’re getting the same stuff anyway … I’m just gonna run with both for a while and see what people say.
I think this is the way to go. You can give this to a linux user who has never used an atomic system this and it’s not that far of a leap. They can remove one of the biggest things people complain about – that their system package manager is weird and needs a reboot. Now they can install btop or whatever and be happy.
Unless there’s a technical reason I don’t see any reason to ever remove it. It’s a strong community with tons of adoption, it’ll just be a thing that will need to be there.
The more I think about it the more of an advantage it becomes. Major distros aren’t going to enable this out of the box, their incentive is for us to use their distro packages. If all we did was be the OS that ships homebrew then that’s a good market to serve because that’s a lot of developers. 
I appreciate your willingness to try it out! Yeah, it’s fun to experiment with them. I think this will be fine.