Arch updates going bad is much more likely to happen if the system goes without updates for a long time. So I’d really not recommend it for a seldomly used laptop.

But regularly updated Arch is fine. Even if something breaks it’s usually easy to deal with.

Why hyprocisy? It’s a fair point to say circumventing paying in some way is piracy. It’s possible, so anyone can decide for themselves.

It is an immutable distro, altough it isn’t image-based like Fedora’s rpm-ostree.

NixOS basically replaces Ansible because the Nix package manager achieves the same goals already (configuration, deployment, …).

But I agree, the work necessary to put into this non-standard distro makes it hard to recommend for a casual user.