Posting here as there doesn’t seem to be an active Arch Linux community.
archlinux@lemmy.ml seems active to m
Your text says qemu-desktop
is only "optional" for qemu-base
. You can safely remove qemu-desktop, pacman won't nag about optional dependencies.
For checking dependencies, I like to use pactree
, it draws nice graphs in the terminal: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Pactree