That worked. Thank you. Pamac is now running correctly.
And I have run sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qqdt) (which I do now and again) and yes, quite a few packages. Could this option not be interactively run at the end of an update? (I have several debian servers set to do this on auto-update.)
This isn’t windows,
For which I am thankfull, believe me. But a way of persuading others to abandon windows is to automate as much as possible - many newly ex-windows users would have been floored by this problem, I’m sure.