Arch is arguably worse than most about this, because their rolling repositories dump versions after a couple of updates are available. So if you wait too long to update, it can't even figure out how to get started, because it no longer has the slightest idea what the packages you have installed even mean.

Don't get me wrong, I like Arch a lot, and I've been using it as my main Linux distribution for the past five years at least. But if don't do a full "pacman -Su" at least once a week, it's absolutely going to shit the bed at some point.