On Arch, upgrading is pretty simple. The only extra step is you need a hook to run mkinitcpio, but that script is on the wiki and you never need to touch it again once set up. From that point onward you just upgrade the driver via pacman.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not like the fact NVIDIA’s drivers aren’t open source and their linux offerings aren’t the greatest, but your issue appears to be due to the way your distro handles the driver.
It always blows my mind how much broken shit Ubuntu gets away with and all their users blame literally everything else without ever once even considering it's Ubuntu that's to blame.
Packages having a hard coded version name and then installing a completely different version is a Ubuntu repo classic.
The vast majority of nvidia system breakage complaints I see seem to come from users of Ubuntu or it's derivatives. I've been on arch based distros for 6 years now and every pc or laptop I've owned in that time has been nvidia and I have never had any problems.
Similar experience here with Arch. The only time I broke stuff was when trying out alternative kernels but even then all you'd have to do is use nvidia-dkms and it works fine with multiple kernels installed.
Yep, I never had a problem with nvidia on arch. Now i'm using NixOS, the setup is even easier and I've still had no problems. This seems like an issue related to Ubuntu packaging