Interesting to choose an immutable distro because "I never had a setup survive multiple years. At some point, package updates would always break something enough that it felt easier to just do a clean install rather than spending hours debugging." when I've never, not once, reloaded due to package manager issues. I've reloaded on the recommendation of the upstream team (Ubuntu release). I've reloaded to get a more up-to-date package index (eg debian stable -> Ubuntu). I've reloaded to get away from systemd and pulseaudio (ubuntu-based distro - forget which, but likely mint), and I've stayed on the same live rolling Gentoo machine without reloading for over a decade.
If your package manager is causing you to reload - find a different distro. And by that, I mean a completely different distro with a different package manager.