I also feel like it “breaking all the time” was part of the stereotype itself. I stopped using Arch because it was stable for almost 3 years and part of the point of using it in the first place was learning Linux by fixing stuff that broke - except that stuff never broke so I grew bored of it.
As with almost every case of these sorts of comparisons, these are likely separate groups of people holding separate groups of opinions.
I don’t use Arch anymore, but when I did I found that the AUR was really useful to quickly install niche applications that would take ages to be approved on to an official repository. Often those would be made by the application developers themselves or members of the community. I would personally vet the packaging script myself, but I’m sure many wouldn’t - and that’s fine. As with most software, there’s some trust involved and often you assume that if you’re installing from a reputable repository it’s going to be fine. If people aren’t vetting the installation scripts and are installing from random repositories, that’s really their problem. I’m glad the possibility existed and it’s the one thing I’ve missed in distros I’ve used since then.