Just go with Arch if you want minimal
debfoster (https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/debfoster) is my favorite tool to keep my Debian installations as small as possible.
I would like to toss out OpenBSD and NetBSD to the minimal list. I doubt nothing is a minimal as these :)
Also, I often go 6+ months without updating this machine. The only friction I've gotten in years is pacman-keyring updates sometimes need to be done first, before updating the rest of the system because of key expiration from going so long between updates. Recently, they merged the community repo into the extra repo and left community empty for the time being, so the only maintenance I did was to remove [community] from my pacman.conf after running a system update a few weeks ago (again, after months of not updating)--and even that I didn't technically need to do yet, since the community repo still exists for now.
Everyone's use case is different, and I surely don't have the same configuration or packages as you or anyone else, but this kind of comment sounds like bullshit to me.
EDIT: Not that I'm agreeing with the recommendation to use Arch if you used to use Ubuntu's minimal install. Arch is a drastic change compared to just doing a full Ubuntu install and removing a bunch of crap...
But, for anyone else reading, I'll say that I ran Arch on my personal laptop from about 2009 to 2020 before I finally stopped using that machine altogether, and I've run Arch on my current personal laptop from about 2015/2016 until now. This current one has an Nvidia GPU, which is a little hit or miss depending on the kernel/driver version.
At various points I've definitely had to spend some time fixing things after updates, but almost all of those were because of packages I had installed from the AUR (a community "repository" of unofficial, untrusted, packages maintained by individual users) that either updated before or after my official Arch packages did, which cause dependency issues. This is certainly no different than any Linux distro where you install a third-party package outside of the official channels that also depends on specific versions of packages being present.
Other times, things broke because I was doing hacky shit, like custom kernel patches.
Certainly there were a few times that breaking changes came from official updates. There was always enough info on the Arch main page and/or forums to either prevent a breakage or to quickly fix it.
This is the price we pay for a rolling release instead of periodic major releases like most popular distros do. I've run Ubuntu on several machines and I've never done a version upgrade without it borking something (often times it was the GRUB config not being updated correctly and failing to boot). Granted, it's been several years since attempting an Ubuntu major version upgrade, so maybe they're awesome and smooth now--I don't know.
I ran Arch on my first laptop for 10 years without ever wiping and reinstalling it. I've run it on my current laptop for going on 7 years (the machine is falling apart, so it probably won't make it to 10, but not because of the OS) without reinstalling. The most fiddling I have to do with my current one is that I sometimes switch between the proprietary Nvidia driver and the free Nouveau driver.
Now, Arch is not for everyone. If you don't want to actually touch config files for all of your underlying system services, and don't want to think about how to partition your disk or what filesystem to use, Arch is no fun. And, to be completely honest, if I weren't already very familiar with Arch, I might not have the energy/time to get into it today. But, I feel lucky that I found Arch when I was young and had not much better to do than tinker around with my computer's OS, because I get pretty frustrated and overwhelmed these days when I have to use something like Ubuntu where I feel like it's a little harder to do anything that's not "standard" (though, I'm not necessarily saying Ubuntu does stuff wrong--just that I like how transparent Arch is).
I don't understand why people thing infrequent updates will break things. This idea seems to have started spreading a few years ago, but nobody I ask can tell me why Arch would break if you didn't update frequently enough.
And if you aren't part of Arch culture and already know that you need to know this, or you step away from a system for long enough and miss some Arch News, you're going to have a uniquely Arch experience when you reflexively pacman -Syu instead of running informant or checkupdates first.
Is it illogical and inscrutable? Not at all. Does it sometimes skip a few steps here and there that can trip up both new users and old ones? For sure.
Arch breaks things all the time. They've needed specific /etc updates, fixes to unbreak config changes, and as I alluded to, holding off updates to stop breaking due to uneven updates of incredibly common shared libraries
Ubuntu used to have a mini.iso too, and it was almost indistinguishable from its Debian counterpart. Both distros relied on apt, and since these minimal installs essentially just contained whatever was needed to have a working system running apt, they were essentially the same, with slightly different default settings. The biggest difference was the release cycle and the attitude towards proprietary software.
As someone who used Debian for decades before experimenting with Arch on my laptop for a few years now, Debian is far more polished and ergonomic in the package tooling.
Coming from Debian you'd expect `pacman` to support doing this, let alone at least say something about it in its man page.
I'm not even sure how the hell you'd figure out `asp` exists and is something you need to explicitly install if all you knew is `pacman`, without using internet searches as an escape hatch.
There was a time long ago when most distros were a hodge podge of work-in-progress discrete tools you had to discover the names of and install separately. Using Arch feels like going back decades in this regard, not in a good way. It's unclear to me why they haven't worked on consolidating these components into a cohesive entrypoint making everything discoverable and more uniform in their UX.