I’m surprised at the number of people who like to tinker and often break the OS they daily drive.
People who don’t use Arch or a derivative (or have tried once but didn’t stay long enough to get comfortable with how it works) seem to think this happens much more than it does
I run the command “yay” once a day if I think of it, every few days if I don’t.
A little less often than that, whenever I think of it, I spend 5 minutes checking for pacnew files (admittedly THIS is potentially a pain compared to other distros, but EOS has a tool that makes it pretty easy)
That’s pretty much it.
Technically you should check the main Arch/EOS/Manjaro page before updating because in the rare event that manual intervention is required there will be instructions there. I usually don’t, and haven’t had a showstopper from it yet.
I can’t remember the last time it took me longer than download time + 5 minutes to upgrade my EOS system, and that includes the recent transition to Plasma 6.