Maybe you are running a desktop environment which never changes but Gnome has been constantly broken in many different ways for the last 5+ years. At times it felt more like a developer playground than a usable desktop environment. KDE is more stable nowadays but it still breaks in mysterious ways from time to time. I also had major issues for some time when Qt6 started rolling out.

And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.

I've been running GNOME. I've never had breakage from upgrading. Of course there's the fact that GNOME neutered itself, removing many of its own features, but that's a different story and has nothing to do with ABIs or upgrading.

> And Arch itself also needs manual interventions on package updates every so often, just a few weeks ago there was a major change to the NVidia driver packaging.

If you're running a proprietary driver on a 12 year old GPU architecture incapable of modern games or AI, yeah... so I actually haven't needed to care about many of these. Maybe 2 or 3 ever...