Hi Gentoo people! Archer bothers you again.
In Arch programs in official repos are vanilla, it's well known. And in Debian/Fedora — as we know it — they patch programs heavily. What about Gentoo? Do maintainers patch programs in Gentoo's repos or place them there vanilla?

It depends on the package, and the package maintainer.

AFAIK, the policy is to put the packages as vanilla as possible, but some times trivial patches are needed to adjust to the distro init system, the fs layout or the package manager.

In some packages you can find a "vanilla" USE flag that serves this purpose. Other USE flags for concrete packages might influence how the code is patched (or not).

For the kernel you have a separate package. The regular Gentoo patched kernel is "gentoo-sources", while the vanilla sources as from kernel.org are called "vanilla-sources".

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There are very few packages for ANY Linux distribution that are 100% vanilla. Even distributions like Slackware often maintain some patches to promote better compatibility between dependencies and programs. Usually, only the Linux kernel is about the most untouched package though some distributions use a few packages here and there, some none at all.

Patches can help, but equally they can hurt so often, you do want to avoid patching unless absolutely necessary.

I disagree. Even in Arch kernel is not vanilla. You can find vanilla kernel in AUR, but by default it's patched. But programs are pretty much all vanilla. So it's quite the opposite of what you said.