The dist upgrade is more of an example meant to dispel the myth that non-rolling release distros break less frequently than rolling release. Or at least, an anecdote anyway.

Jumping down from the meta level of rolling vs non-rolling, I personally find Archlinux style of packaging much much simpler than Debian's. I've writte numerous PKGBUILD files over the years and it's been dead simple. But my eyes gloss over whenever I look at Debian packages.

I'm sure the complexity in Debian is warranted for one reason or another. But it ain't for me.

Note that, Ubuntu had some rough times, and did some odd things (I distinctly remember changing gid of system groups, for example) - but it has gotten a lot better. I don't think I can remember Debian ever having any serious issues on dist upgrade. Well, there was a bit of hairpulling with the change from lilo to grub - but I think that was because I tried it early, before grub became the new standard..).

But of course, there are no perfect tradeoffs. I'm inclined to believe GNU guix (or nixos) might be the next best thing(tm) - but I've yet to put that to the test..

But what about Pop!_OS?