It doesn’t give a message like that. You know it tried other mirrors because it successfully downloaded the DBs and completed.
The pacnew files are created by pacman. See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave
The endeavouros-mirrorlist is the EOS-specific mirrors.
The hooks directory is a place to store pacman hooks.
The gnupg directory contains pacman’s keyring.