The meme text itself refers to “frequent” updates. Seems weird to compare apples to oranges, since release updates are not frequent. Even still, updating from buster to bookworm was relatively painless; certainly not 3 hours of reconfiguration. Before that, I was on Ubuntu, and the release updates were also painless; I remember multiple times not needing to do anything except uncomment the sources.list(.d) changes.
[edit: Another quick point. Since Debian/Ubuntu manage configuration for you to some extent, you don’t need to fix configuration files as often as you would need to on Arch, hence not needing to do ~20+ config changes for two years of updates all at once.]