I’ve never experienced a broken homebrew and I’ve used Mac for years
Neither have I. My main complaint is that it's slow.
The comment was in response to parent's stated complaint, namely having to wait for someone else to resolve issues with popular packages being broken after an update, which has been the experience of more than one user.
Things like macports and pkgsrc do things in an arguably much simpler, more unixy way, without the contortions that so often seem to leave homebrew in a bind after routine operations like updating.