Yeah, I ran Arch for years and every time the wiki or someone in irc said, "Do it X way, not Y," I always followed that instruction. Never had a single issue with system stability.
Guess that's atypical? I learned a lot, these days I mostly use Ubuntu or Debian.
Tbh, trusting pacman with everything and keeping my AUR pkg sources preserved in a source folder is literally all it took to keep the system stable. Idk, is that a lot? It felt easy.