> I got tired of running `pacman -Syu`, rebooting, and having my machine not turn on due to some new kernel change or some video driver change, or something else.

I did get an update that disabled the trackpad on my Asus laptop around Fedora 32 or so. It was an upstream kernel bug that got fixed in a few days, but it was still pretty annoying. This was during a regular dnf update within the same major version, not an update from 32->33 (the kernel gets updated regularly, not just between Fedora version updates).

So personal anecdotes and YMMV.