Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.

Not OP, but modularity. An X11 WM is just a WM. You can choose compositor, bar, shortcut daemon, etc. With Wayland, a single implementation holds most of that, and more. If you need a specific feature from your display server, you are stuck on WMs that support it. This has forced me to use KDE for Wayland on my main workstation, and although it works well, it’s not my prefered WM/workflow.

Alongside that, no clones of several X11 WMs exist. bspwm for example. Riverwm exists, but has major limitations, and the workflow isn’t the same.

The extra y just forces a database update. The mechanism to detect when not to update the database is a simple timestamp compare, and shouldn’t break. archlinux-keyring might need a “manual” update if an Arch Linux system is left without updates for a longer period of time. That’s the only situation doing pacman -Sy, then pacman -S archlinux-keyring is recommended, and it needs to be followed with pacman -Syu to avoid a partial upgrade.