For Arch, I believe yay is no longer being maintained by its creator - he has replaced it with a new helper called paru - if you’re interested in an AUR helper, this may be of better use to you.
My understanding is that such propaganda (i.e., yay is dying) emanates from a developer who left the team - and started paru.
The yay package manager is being actively maintained (check out its github site) and the folks there are not happy about this silliness being spread to disparage their fine work (including by folks like DistroTube - who swallowed such rubbish without doing independent research on the claim and still seems reluctant to admit his mistatements),.
Given how awesome yay has been to all of us users, it clearly deserves better treatment from our community.
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I was just informing the OP that there was another option - I do not use AUR helpers like yay or paru myself - git clone and makepkg -si get it done for me.
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I’ve often wondered whether what you’re doing might be a better path … but then I’m reminded of the benefits of having a package manager keep track of dependencies/conflicts when it comes to installing & uninstalling packages over time. Am curious as to how you handle that side of things?
(BTW: On the yay vs paru topic … recent updates on github to yay are ongoing … but paru? not so much 
)
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I’ve read up on some of the things yay can do and it does seem to do a lot of helpful things. I believe that the bleeding edge Arch approach keeps packages pretty well updated - although it can’t be perfect - especially with the AUR - they’re not all maintained and some are way out of date. Whenever I install a package from AUR, it always asks a couple of times during the process - I’ve read that it’s because it is checking for conflicts and dependencies.
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The AUR helpers, as well as the “hands on” approach with using makepkg
all ultimately use pacman to install the packages. It will keep track of things in any case.
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It is very interesting. How does pacman keep track of AUR packages? And how do you handle AUR package updates without aur helper?
makepkg
AUR PKGBUILD’s are recipes to either build from source or use ready made binaries
and then package them so that pacman can work with them.
… the same way it deals with all packages … 
I’ll not go deeper - the Arch wiki is an excellent source of answers for your questions.
That’s obvoius.
I’m asking how you manage to update packages from AUR without using aur helper? Pacman doesn’t really help with that.
I believe this is the third time I mentioned it:
makepkg
And how do you know there are updates available in the AUR?
Also makepkg or aur helper?
You don’t.
Ok, all clear. I just misinterpreted Pacman keep track, sorry.
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