I've been on Manjaro (arch based) for the past four years. It's mostly been fine but I've had to recover it from a botched Grub update once (an update randomly self destructed its configuration), which wasn't fun. But after four years it's in good shape, everything works, I run the latest kernel, etc. I have zero reason to wipe its installation and reinstall it again. Most other Linux distributions never lasted four years until I found a need to reinstall them or install some newer version.

And it's Linux so regardless of the distribution you'll be dealing with some amount of weird shit on regular basis. Has been true since I cycled home with a stack of slackware floppies almost thirty years ago. There's always configuration files to fiddle with, weird shit to install, etc.

But an immutable base OS makes a lot of sense and it's not mutually exclusive with that being updated regularly. Containerization is the norm for a lot of server side stuff. Effectively, I've been using immutable server operating systems for almost a decade. It's fine. All the stuff I care about runs in a container. And that container can run on anything that can run containers. Which is literally almost anything these days. I generally don't care much about the base OS aside from just running my containers hassle free on a server.

Containerization would make sense for a lot of end user software as well. IMHO things like flatpak and snap would be fine if they weren't so anal/flaky about "security". Because they are protecting a mutable OS from the evil foreign software. Running a bit of software that needs a GPU isn't a security problem, it's the main FFing reason I'm using the computer at all. Or own a GPU. This needs to be easy, not hard. And it shouldn't need a lot of manual overrides.

If I run a browser or things like Dartable, I usually have no reason to run them in crippled/unaccelerated mode. Sorry that's not a thing. It's the main reason I bypass flatpak on Manjaro for both packages. And I bypass PAC as well because I trust Firefox to have a good release process. So, I use the tar ball and it self updates without unnecessary delay. Which considering a lot of its updates are about security is exactly what I want.

Same with development tools. I use vs code and intellij. Both can self update. I have no need for a third party package manager second guessing those updates or dragging their heels getting those updates to me.