> Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall

Not at all. I have even recovered from bricking the package manager (my fault, these days there are protections in place against that). Worst case you manually extract working binaries and then clean up the mess. And I have never run into issues that needed such drastic measures without doing stupid things.

It is however not a distro for those unwilling to understand how it works.