so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
Having used the same Testing install since early 2022, I'd say it's not too bad. Stability-wise, I only have a major problem once a year.
Eventually, you get tired of having to switch to Flatpaks while packages transition. I'll either stay on Trixie when it goes to stable or reinstall. It's still an ext4 system and I want something different, as stable as ext4 is. I've been using btrfs on my new laptop for about a month and have been happy.
Honestly, in the age of Flatpaks, stable Debian is fine for most people in my opinion.
True; as said, this is Debian Testing. By "major issue", I mean Grub occasionally gets borked and I have to chroot in and fix it, or the time_t_64 transition.
I found the compromise between stability and newer packages acceptable for my desktop machine, which I am usually only on when I would actually have the time to debug these things. However, these days, I'm busy, thus may switch to stable in the next few months.