Whenever I use an Arch laptop that I haven't touched in a while and need to do an update on it, there will be update conflicts that need to be resolved manually. I'm pretty sure this happened every time. There are tons of posts on the forum about update conflicts.

The core of any argument against Arch is that it's a bleeding-edge Distro, which means more breakage.

That's a fair concern but in my experience you have lots of the benefits of being up near the edge with very little blood.

It helps to read the Arch news link but normally I've missed it the rare time I ought to have checked it and you can still just figure things out and move on quickly.

For years now I've had almost nothing break except some intermittent minor annoyance with trivial bits of KDE. I'll live!