Years and it was so much more stable than trying to do a version update on something like Ubuntu. Just run pacman every week or so and you’re fine. Also… A manual intervention never resulted in any data loss. At the VERY worst you might need to break out chroot and do something annoying.

All of my bad experiences happened at the beginning as I was learning. And no, I would not suggest that a new arch user use it for anything important. But that’s not bc of arch. It’s because the user hasn’t usually learned the differences between the hand holding of other distros and the dirty hands mentality to tune the engine yet.