Pacman now tells you when there is an announcement in the website. Most of this announcements are due some issue introduced in a package. I haven't faced all of them as usually they resolved quickly and when I update the system the new packages solves the issue. Rarely there has been a breaking change in a package that needed some easy manual intervention. I have maybe done this line 5 or 6 times in 15 years. Compared to Ubuntu, I find it upgrading process more tedious (I haven't tried it in the last year's so maybe now is better). Said that, probably i won't use arch for a production environment and stick to Ubuntu, but for home/work system, I love it