We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.
$ cat /etc/issue
Antergos Linux \r (\l)
Sometimes once a month, sometimes once a week, sometimes more if there's a critical CVE.
It is a million times more sane to have a package manager throw a warning or an error when a breaking change is about to be applied, rather than just YOLO the breaking change and pray people read the release log.
It is one of the most stupid policies ever, and the main reason why I will steer everyone away from Arch forever. Once bitten, twice shy.
I do subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list which warns of breaking changes, but that receives around 10 messages per year, and the vast majority aren't actually all that important.
I've also gone multiple months between updates and didn't have any problems there either.
The idea that Arch Linux breaks all the time is just complete nonsense.
Here's one of the oldest versions of the "Arch-based distributions" page on the wiki. It has a notice at the top that says that forks are not supported by the community or developers: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Arch-based_distri...
The only (real but small) difference is between desktop environments and their choice of default apps (eg. file manager).