Well, manual interventions are rare [0] and almost all of them nowadays are due to the odd package restructuring. Usually the package manager will notify you about a conflict between two packages and won't proceed (so nothing will break). At this point you can check the website if there is a need to force install a package or two.

Although definitely more technical than most distributions the perceived difficulty of Arch is mostly a meme at this point. The last large possibly-system-breaking change was almost 10 years ago [1]. And even then, the solution was quite trivial. Now if you are forcing updates that conflict without reading the news then you're in for a bad time, but that's true for all distributions. In general pacman is very conservative and won't leave your system partially updated. Now there is a chance upstream updates break things, but that's the nature of the rolling release model.

Manual compilations are not necessary if you stick to the official repositories. If you need a package in the AUR then a ports-like setup is required. I have packaged stuff for both RPM and DEB-based distributions, nothing really beats the simplicity and flexiblity of the Archlinux packaging tools.

[0]: https://archlinux.org/news/

[1]: https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-symli...