In all likelihood once a year an Arch distro requires intervention by someone who knows what he is doing. For Debian that is zero, unless you are switching versions.

You forgot all the times that debian requires you to run terminal instructions just to add a new repo, to get a specific type of software that's new for a specific feature you want, instead of one that's ancient and crusty. And then the inevitable conflicts that result when you try to upgrade a system that is trying to ship two versions of e.g. openssl concurrently because the one new program needs network access and a new version of GLIBC.

I ran a single Arch Linux install concurrently for 7 years before 2020 (i.e. before the rot took hold) and needed to use the terminal to fix things less than I ever did Ubuntu around the same time period.

Well yeah; if you exclude the main maintenance task of a non-rolling distro, the rolling distro looks like it has more maintenance.