Also pacman is the fastest package manager I’ve ever used.

I hope you enabled parallel downloads, that makes it fast as fuck.

Apt is very quick as well (with the nala frontend), no complaints there. I've been running Arch for the past 5 years and recently switched to Debian Stable. The "grub event" was certainly notable, but otherwise I don't think Arch is really that unstable or gimmicky. Arch itself is a very solid and dependable platform - the reason I decided to move is because I really don't need the bleeding edge packages from other projects anymore. With Flatpaks and all the rest of the /home-based package managers that are around now, I can keep a stable base system and install a couple bleeding edge packages that I want, instead of being forced to run my entire system as bleeding edge (do my printer drivers really need to make me bleed?).

Overall, I'd say the Arch experience is as high quality as the Debian experience, they just target different usecases. Neither of them is better, it's just up to the user how bloody they want their system to be.

Somehow mkinitcpio broke my initramfs the other day when I installed the latest microcode updates. Took me like an hour to debug the issue and boot from the fallback 😑. That’s the first time I’ve had an issue like that though. I’ve been using arch for a few years now.

Btrfs would beg to differ.