Remove linux-firmware-meta package?

[soundofthunder]

Just to reiterate that mentioned in Known Issues and Solutions linux-firmware-meta replaces linux-firmware:

If you wish to uninstall the firmware packages that you don’t need — e.g. linux-firmware-nvidia — including the meta package itself, then be sure to mark the firmware packages you wish to keep as explicitly installed, or else pacman will regard them as orphans, which would be dangerous when cleaning out your real orphans.

As also mentioned, if you remove firmware packages, mark those you wish to keep as explicitly installed:

sudo pacman -D --asexplicit <name-of-package(s)>