I’m running Manjaro Cinnamon. This update downloaded and installed a part of gnome, bibata cursor theme, papirus icon theme and some other gnome fancy (for me - useless) stuff and branding worth almost 1GiB of disk space.
System updates shouldn’t install new packages unless they have to.
Which was? 
Switching the default cursor theme was the only change to manjaro-cinnamon-settings. Linux Mint is using it by default now, FYI:
Mouse Pointer
Linux Mint 21.1 switched to the Bibata mouse pointer theme from Abdulkaiz Khatri.
The Bibata mouse pointer
– New Features in Linux Mint 21.1 'Vera' Cinnamon Edition - Linux Mint
Thanks for the reply. I wasn’t really aware that Linux Mint switched to 0.5GiB mouse pointers.
And about the extra gnome packages that got installed:
extra/geoclue 2.6.0-3 1,51 MiB 0,21 MiB
extra/geocode-glib-2 3.26.4-2 0,79 MiB 0,09 MiB
extra/geocode-glib-common 3.26.4-2 0,06 MiB 0,01 MiB
extra/gjs 2:1.74.1-1 1,39 MiB 0,42 MiB
extra/gnome-autoar 0.4.3-2 0,53 MiB
extra/gnome-desktop 1:43-1 0,54 MiB 0,11 MiB
extra/gnome-desktop-common 1:43-1 2,84 MiB 0,47 MiB
extra/gnome-session 43.0-1 1,44 MiB 0,33 MiB
extra/gnome-settings-daemon 43.0-2 5,64 MiB 0,92 MiB
extra/gnome-shell 1:43.2-1 11,27 MiB 1,71 MiB
extra/gtk4 1:4.8.2-1 36,64 MiB 6,92 MiB
extra/js102 102.4.0-1 66,80 MiB 10,83 MiB
extra/libgdm 43.0-1 0,63 MiB 0,08 MiB
extra/libgit2 1:1.5.0-2 2,64 MiB
extra/libgweather-4 4.2.0-1 22,37 MiB 3,00 MiB
extra/libibus 1.5.27-1 93,57 MiB 9,66 MiB
extra/mutter 43.2-1 14,21 MiB 2,69 MiB
extra/ttf-hack 3.003-3 1,21 MiB 0,38 MiB
edit:
the funny thing is that most of them (if not all) have been uninstalled by running pacman -Rusc on bibata cursor theme, so it must have been some kind of dependency here.
Did you accidentally install manjaro-gnome-settings instead of manjaro-cinnamon-settings?
Please post your Pacman log from the update. If you updated today (Dec. 21), then use the following command as is. Otherwise change the date to yesterday if necessary:
grep -i 2022-12-21 /var/log/pacman.log
Please copy and paste it to a pastebin service and link it here.
here you go:
I’ve removed the extra packages by running pacman -Rusc bibata-cursor-theme, here’s the log from this run:
My system is still up and running, nothing seems broken so far.
This is an almost 2 yr old instance, it seems like it doesn’t have manjaro-cinnamon-settings installed at all. I’ve removed it right after installation while removing papirus theme:
[2021-02-09T22:08:36+0100] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Rusc papirus-icon-theme'
[2021-02-09T22:08:56+0100] [ALPM] transaction started
[2021-02-09T22:08:56+0100] [ALPM] removed manjaro-cinnamon-settings (20200804-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:56+0100] [ALPM] removed xcursor-breeze (5.11.5-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:56+0100] [ALPM] removed ttf-comfortaa (3.101-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:56+0100] [ALPM] removed qt5ct (1.1-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed mint-themes (1:1.8.3-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed manjaro-base-skel (20171029-3)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed kvantum-manjaro (0.13.5-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed kvantum-qt5 (0.18.0-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed kwindowsystem (5.78.0-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed qt5-x11extras (5.15.2-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed qt5-svg (5.15.2-1)
[2021-02-09T22:08:57+0100] [ALPM] removed papirus-maia-icon-theme (20200702-1)
[2021-02-09T22:09:06+0100] [ALPM] removed papirus-icon-theme (20210201-1)
[2021-02-09T22:09:07+0100] [ALPM] transaction completed
Line 110:
[2022-12-21T17:16:05+0100] [ALPM] installed manjaro-gnome-settings (20221220-2)
Actually you should have done with manjaro-gnome-settings 
No idea how you ended up with it installed. bibata-cursor-theme (which has no dependencies) is a new dependency for manjaro-gnome-settings and manjaro-cinnamon-settings, nothing else changed.
Yeah, I can’t figure it out as well. But at least it went away easily.
And my laptop is not affected by this (I haven’t updated my laptop at the time of reporting this issue).
Thanks for investigating the problem!