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IMHO the power of gentoo is the customization, not the optimizations you can do when compiling. You can change the dependencies and config of software to get exactly what you want instead of a config somebody else has chosen for you.

I used Sabayon back in the days for a few years and you are expected to accept the defaults for most packages and use it as a mostly binary distro, but you also have the option to use emerge(gentoo’s package manager) to customize only some packages via USE flags. It was working quite well as far as I remember.

This. USE flags are the real strength of Gentoo. There can be benefits with various C(XX)FLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc. However, most of the time^1^ those changes are at best moderate, and sometimes outright dangerous.

With Gentoo, if $PKG has a choice to require $LIBKITCHENSINK, you can choose not to. This, sometimes, can mean saving a TON of compile time. Also, the kernel is arguable more secure^2^.

1) One time I recompiled either Opera, or some lib it depended on with some magic LDFLAGS and got a notable speedup on startup. However, this is fairly rare. 2) IIRC, a certain part of the kernel can rerandomize the kernel stack in memory, meaning that, unlike a Debian kernel or Fedora kernel, no one can be entirely sure what a certain data structure would be in memory.