This is actually something that keeps tempting me to try arch, since it having gone all-in on systemd early on would hopefully give me a more 'native' systemd experience and help me figure out which of my gripes are with systemd and which of them are with how-$distro-added-systemd.
Thing is, I'd only want such an install for playing around with occasionally and as the argument upthread makes pretty clear, "doing a bulk upgrade occasionally" is something that really isn't regarded as a sensible way to run arch.
I do my upgrades every few weeks, for what it's worth, and I've had the same Arch install since 2013. The size of the upgrade should very rarely have any effect on whether it succeeds; you're just more likely to have missed some major changes if you're upgrading without checking the latest news from the website.
Partial updates are also unsupported, and in my experience that's the most common way people break things.
I haven't used plain Debian, but this has been my experience with Ubuntu. Almost all the problems I've run into with systemd have been because of an interaction with init.d scripts that should be systemd units, or similar. My biggest complaint is that while systemd-resolved is supposed to be optional, on Ubuntu it is practically impossible to fully disable without breaking things, and disabling is officially "unsupported". On archlinux, if you want to use dnsmasq instead it is just a matter of disabling one service and enabling the other.