> requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything
This is a failing of an improperly tested update, not of the model. You do need to beat all the possible glitches out of updates as they come in some testing repo, but if you do and you can deliver rock solid iterative updates it is the natural way to keep a system up to date.
Oh my goodness, no. Rolling release requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything from the repos (because, as Arch says, "partial upgrades are not supported", as a practical matter I have to update everything before installing anything.) Breakage is also a routine possibility any time I install security updates.
I also have machines that connect to the Internet solely through a cellular data plan. I have no desire to such bandwidth for all these updates.
Rolling release gets me nothing I'm interested in. I use Debian stable on all my machines.