I've been using arch-based distros on multiple systems for the about 5 years now. I never read release notes, and have also never had any system-breaking updates. Occasionally I get problems with AUR packages but they usually solve themselves by doing a clean-build, reinstall, or just by waiting a day for a dependency to update. In the rare case that none of those work, there's usually a message on the AUR package page providing an exact fix. I usually just run "yay -Syu" once a day, recently I've been doing it once per week and still haven't had any real problems with it.