What I get from this is to stay very far away from Arch if I want to update regularly and not fuss with it. But that's not an indictment of distros designed to be stable.

And your experience of Arch with automatic updates is very different from their semi-suggestion of Arch with no updates.

As for ZFS, I don't use it for root, in part so that even when I mess with things I know it'll boot fine. But that only applies to root.