Oh, Arch was rock solid and I was also able to keep my install going for years. However, in the few instances where I would get a new laptop or experience a drive failure, it was non-trivial to get it going again. If you're using a stock install + Gnome, it's not bad, but I had lots of things set up (e.g. Secure Boot, udev rules, usbguard, tiling WM, etc.) and those are all things you can declare in a NixOS + Home Manager config, have versioned, and re-establish in ~30 minutes instead of days.