> on Arch you're supposed to be able to handle basic sysadmin tasks yourself

And the reason for this is because you realize the latest update killed virtualbox and you require it for your work so you need to be able to downgrade and pin the vbox application to a specific version.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu catches the problem and refuses to update the package until it's fixed. Therefore I never even realize there was a breaking update to vbox somewhere.

The difference being that Arch tells me when to tinker because it blew up again, Ubuntu allows me to choose when to tinker because it doesn't.