One of the unsung praises of Arch is that it's turned thousands of users into testers. Before someone says "that shouldn't be the user's responsibility" I'm going to say I'm not so sure. We're all in this together. I'd rather deal with a bug or two on my desktop at home if it means it gets fixed before appearing in a distro that gets used for servers at work and causes issues there where the consequences are much higher.
I have a similar experience. My not-so-tech-savvy brother also has the same laptop setup I do (arch+XFCE). He knows to yay -Syyu and it's usually never a problem. The recent upgrade there was the vlc package split problem so I told him to hold on upgrading and that I'd come and do it. While I needed to sit and filter and install the optional dependencies myself for my upgrade, a week later it was already figured out (based on user feedback I assume) and the usual yay -Syyu installed just the right optional dependencies.
> One of the unsung praises of Arch is that it's turned thousands of users into testers.
You can do that well enough with Debian's "testing" and "unstable" release channels. Aside from the few months leading up to a new "stable" release, which usually isn't a big deal (and fixing regressions in "stable" should then be a higher priority anyway). Just don't install it on systems that you actually depend on to keep working. But running it on your desktop at home that you only use to play and experiment with is just fine.