Has Arch gotten much worse recently or something? When I used it they were pretty good about posting “manual intervention required” when needed on the front page of their site.

Not at all. Also usually when things break you can just Google and fix it within a few minutes.

It's not the hours of debugging why grub suddenly broke or X isn't starting anymore it was long ago.

It hasn’t. I can’t remember a “rug pull” in the last 10 years. People forget arch packages are pretty much as close to upstream as you can get, the arch packagers tend to do as little as possible.