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...