Haha, exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. You probably had the same issue as me. The driver dropped support for older cards and you had to switch to a legacy AUR package. I fixed it with some frantic googling while my friends waited a half hour. Not sure how you would know this without subscribing to some arch news feed or something. Not ideal.
That's exactly how it's supposed to work: Arch expects you to check the notes on their news section always before you update. The NVIDIA driver issue and solution was posted on Dec 20th.
I'm not saying I'm reading these regularly, just that yes it's the expected way.
So it wouldn't be incorrect to refer to Arch and Arch based distros as 'well, if you want to have fun with a broken system, otherwise avoid', just so it could be mentioned in a succinct way when talking about what distros one could try.
No, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. People regularly report having quite old Arch installs without stability issues. And people also regularly advice Linux newcomers not to pick Arch.
If you check their news section, it's a reasonable number of notes, 13 for last year. I think it's fair to say it seems to work well if you are willing to follow their procedure and already know what you're doing.
