Personally I didn't experience all that much breakage, but eventually got frustrated by kernel updates breaking hotplug kernel module loading until reboot because Arch removes kernel modules for the running kernel. This breaks random things like plugging in a USB drive unless you happened to load the module previously, so you're essentially forced to reboot every time you upgrade the kernel or take care to manually exclude it.
I'm grateful for Arch because their wiki is beyond excellent, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they just want to tinker.
Is your supposition that a "misconfiguration" just "happened" randomly over night?
No, it's a rolling release distribution, software on it will break randomly on updates. You need to read their FAQ, even their official document will tell you this happens and it's not their responsibility due to the rolling release nature of the distribution.
If that's not it, then I've no clue anymore about what you mean as broken.
Certainly, Arch is definitely not a "it just works" OS. It's a tinkerer's OS. Different distros favor different types of users. By what you said, probably something like Ubuntu or Mint is better, something that "just works" with minimal learning curve for someone not familiar with Linux in general and that does not wish to invest the time in learning it. (Not saying that you're not at least familiar with it, but that's what these distros optimize for, I believe.)