I tried arch out in 2016. Over a period of two weeks, 3 separate updates broke one thing or another.

In my 4 years using mint / ubuntu, an update broke my machine once, and that was when the power went out during an update.

Arch apparently works great for a lot of people, but I'd urge caution.

Did it break in an unrecoverable way, or was it just an inconvenience?

Arch is a rolling release that many choose to update daily, or on a fixed schedule, like once a week. That updates sometimes can break a thing or two, out of hundreds of updates, is to be expected. If that sounds scary to you, Arch is certainly not for you. That said, it has rarely happened to me, and any breakage is usually minor and easily fixed. It's not like you have to even figure out how; it's laid out for you on the Wiki, Forum or Arch's homepage. My experience with other distros has been far more troubling, except Slackware. Arch's strengths easily outweigh occasional inconveniences. Not having to deal with anything Ubuntu or Canonical is a great bonus.

I originally went Slackware when diving into Linux. Manual dependency resolution was just a step too far. Installing Calibre became a nightmare. I turned to Arch and have been very happy. I simply don’t have the time to properly maintain a Slackware box. I do really like it though.

I hear you regarding time... If I didn't regularly try out new software it could still be a viable choice, but now I enjoy the ease of Arch's ecosystem. I guess a lot of people who still use Slack does a full install and have few needs beyond those packages.

My admittedly anecdotal counter to that... With “begintermeditate” Linux experience, I spun up Arch on a machine with an AMD processor/mobo and dirt cheap graphics card to act as a server in February 2017. I system update when I remember (every 1-4 weeks). I haven’t had anything break. Admittedly, I containerize nearly everything (Plex, Calibre server, bittorrent clients, etc) out of pure laziness and do very little outside that on the machine. It has been incredily low maintenance, and has been wonderful. I’d highly recommend.