Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don't have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven't had an issue yet.

That doesn't happen. When it breaks, it's always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)

I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.

I'd guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.

Skill issue.

I've been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

It's all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that's not what you want, stick to Debian.