Indeed, so why is Deepin the only distro worthy of a "Friendly Link" on the Ventoy home page? Are they a sponsor of the project? Code contributor? Preferred demo platform?

It's not the only link: there's also some Chinese forum.

Maybe it's Longpanda's favourite distro? It is a very good one. I've reviewed it:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/01/deepin_205_surfaces/

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/25/deepin_206_23/

It is one of the major distros, with millions of users, and yet there is very little knowledge of it in the West. Its commercial upstream claims to have over 3 million paid users:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/20/3_million_deepin_user...

I suspect that in plain old user numbers it is up there with Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, and yet you rarely even hear it mentioned in the same breath. Nor is its desktop, DDE, which is FOSS and is supported in Fedora, openSUSE and has its own Ubuntu remix.