Physical maps are great, but they do get outdated the more time passes, not sure how relevant that would have been in this scenario but.

Never had an unbootable system after an update, all not checking news has ever done to me is having a package fail to install (and then I check the news to see how to fix it), I’ve seen plenty of kernel regressions or other software, but that’s a thing with upstream and getting not-as-tested software, not with arch itself

yes