From DHH's long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey's backend is so efficient because it's written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).
The real work of maintaining a distro is maintaining the package lists (and ensuring none of the packages are broken, buggy, etc). So if you have your own package lists, it’s a distro. If you don’t, “it’s a distro” is a much weaker claim IMO.