So, which of the Arch variants is most similar to Puppy in its spirit? Well, it's probably Obarun. Without systemd. S6 supervision suite as init and 66 as service management. JWM as windows manager.
There is also ArchBang. But there's just an Openbox. In addition, the author's mood, like mine, depends on the rain And since it was raining in the UK in March, he started thinking about replacing Openbox with JWM or Cinnamon. He does not consider MATE (and I like MATE specifically). He doesn't like xfce4, there is no response from users to DWM.
And then he went back to Openbox again. But he decided to replace the tint2 panel with polybar.
Now, in general, many people are trying to find their own special way in the development of Linux But mostly it seems that everything will come down to switching control to the keyboard and memorizing hotkeys.