I don't think Cloaky really has any answer to Archer

The first time I thought I could use air against them was a good laugh, too, if their front-loaded AA wasn't great already. Amphbots, man.

My 2 cents: Their builder is also apparently nearly as BP-efficient as a caretaker, but they're definitely slow (*the* slowest afaik), like spiders without a flea (or weaver-radar). Possibly a special evasive playstyle - like hit-where-they-are-not, perpetually - can still be explored. Idk. Maybe Djinns would become a necessity, then, too.

Archer comfortably outranges Reaver and also immobilizes it. Any Reaver entering Archer attack range is dead in the water, with no chance to escape.

Con swarm automatically loses map control because it means the opponent can naked expand while you have to porc every crevice. In both of these games this is pretty much what @zenfur does - rush corners with his cons covered by Archers. This means that he can prevent my builders from colonizing the corners by killing them with his raiders. But if i try the same, his raiders kill mine because they're Archer.

I can't see how Reaver can do anything to Archer without the Archer user making grievous mistakes. So i suspect your matchups were unequal.

i did some testing with Anir about that some time ago.
there, ronins beat archer if 2 conditions were met:
1. no cliffs etc around, so no hiding or tossing ronins in pits
2. at least 5 ronins needed to saturate the area enough.

Ronins were on simple fight command, archers were microed by Anir who has
arguably better micro then me.

As a former cloaky-player, i agree that the factory almost instantly lost it´s status as
very viable in most situations (at least in the perception of many good players).
This is maybe a point for another thread, but the meta changed to factories that are
extremely effective against cloakies, at least early game: Tanks, Shields, Jumpers.