Genuinely interested: did the distro break "on its own", or was it due to something you did? Not trying to suggest you are incompetent: maybe "doing it right" is not intuitive, and that's an issue. But I wonder which distro publishes changes that they call "stable" and just break things. Or worse get to the point where it requires a complete reinstall every year...

For instance, by installing stuff on the system with "sudo make install" that breaks the expectations of the system package manager, or by modifying config files and then not handling the merge conflict during the update, or stuff like this?

Very, very long ago I remember having to reinstall some nvidia drivers once in a while (but while annoying it took minutes), and I haven't used nvidia since then.