@kawika
According to what your terminal indicates, I would eliminate what pacman says and reinstall the packages that are from xfce4 and others from gnome that are important, to my humble understanding, they are:
Tracker is also in the Xfce install so if gnome-online-miners breaks it then maybe it also needs to be reinstalled. But i think you are right on the others. I checked the packages on a new install.
@Resiliencia I have done the same and i don’t see any reason why if necessary you couldn’t go into tty and use pacman to install these first before logging into the desktop.
How about just ctrl+alt+f2, force remove gnome and Gnome extras then without rebooting reinstall xfce4 and possibly xfce4-goodies if you use that, THEN reboot?
Edit: that’s how I removed cinnamon before (last install. Did a clean Xfce installthis time). Xfce4 will pull back network manager again.
The EOS installer will remove Gnome and install XFCE the quick and clean way. But I understand if someone wants knowledge from messing around with other ways, been there done that, my messing around days are over now that my brain has knowledge of the universe.