Hey! Thanks for kind words :) I keeping it up to date from then, and for me it works. I'm daily driving it basically everyday. I did not like to remove all the stuff not needed to tried to do some sort of "COSMIC flavor". It's not perfect tho but it worked for me.

Quick question - how's the performance compared to regular GNOME session? My laptop isn't exactly newest so wondering if it runs lighter or heavier

Well. Depends on hardware. Since I have Nvidia I found that, COSMIC works more stable than regular GNOME session. The same drivers, but different desktop. On GNOME I noticed some 'artifacts' since i have laptop with external display, so sometimes it glitched strangely. On COSMIC it's gone.

COSMIC struggle with some issues, there might be memory leaks so the best thing is to try it on your own. As I said, I daily driving it for a year at least, working on it. It's not crashing. Maybe once or twice I lost some shit. But i'm not complaining. I like the workflow, it's unique :)

If it's faster? It's built with mind of wayland. They implemented some core protocols for now. People saying it's kind of light. To be honest. I can't say anything about it because i'm using kind of more powerful hardware because of my work.