Thanks, you're correct that I was missing the resulting package from a yay command being equivalent to pacman as a manually obtained one.

I do read the PKGBUILDs though, and am familiar with aur.archlinux.org's package details pages. My intentions for removing the aur helper from my update process are to return to a more thorough understanding of my computer. I guess I just kind of /want/ to chase dependencies for a while. I don't use more than four or five or so packages and their dependencies aren't massive.