Arch and derivatives are great distros. And you’re probably inclined to recommend them to new Linux users. They are so easy to install picking the right flavor cough EndeavourOS cough
But at the end of the day you can’t sugarcoat that some advanced knowledge is required. Updating the system is a core task, merging some text files is necessary eventually, and nobody in the extended Arch universe invests the energy to automagically solve those issues.
I believe a new Linux person wouldn’t have been caught by this as they wouldn’t have known about merging files.
Oh nooooooooes, editing manually / distro changed configuration files is such an insanely advanced nowel knowledge for Arch Linux users, who can possibly handle that!
There is no such thing as a distribution of GNU/Linux that is for everyone.
Even in the current year, there are still people who do all of their computing on a niche gaming platform known as windoze.
This one of those situations where it is knowledge that is biting them. If they didn’t know about the pacnew they wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place.
ppfft… 
Even my mother uses Arch Linux and merges .pacnew files 
Well, I haven’t “merged” any .pacnew file in quite a while, everything works fine, still.
New versions of software that add stuff to config files rarely break with old config files that miss that stuff. That would be very bad software design.
You’re clearly not an advanced Arch Linux user
Look at you, don’t even want to edit a file!
True…but that’s exactly the point, most software is soyware.
Granted, you can probably run Arch ignoring pacnew (and friends) for months or even years. - Not knowing about the problem doesn’t make the problem go away though. Arch expects the user to resolve pacnew (and friends) to keep the system in a state that is considered maintained by the distro.
The recent fuss
It seems to me there isn’t enough fuss, so people come up with self-created problems to make their computer use more interesting.
To be honest, I never merge pacnew files unless something breaks which I am not sure has ever happened on one of my systems.
Who knew that even my mother is more advanced Arch Linux user than our best Arch Linux forum’s AI @dalto !
Now, that’s what I call AdVAnCeD!
Yes…sometimes you need just a little HONK in your life…
The funniest thing in that whole episode was the fact you used -r option with rm to remove a single file. 
yeah…and it was totally coincidental too btw!
I don’t follow many of the advises in “How to run a stress-free EndeavourOS” and none of my devices ever broke. But keeping your local device in sync with the distro configuration is probably desirable, even if a derivation is still supposed to work. And we have evidence of breakage.
Imho there isn’t any valid argument for letting your local installation unintentionally drifting away from what the distro provides. We just don’t keep them in sync because a) we aren’t aware of it or b) we don’t know how to do it or c) it’s inconvenient. All of those reasons are understandable and we can argue about the impact, but not that it shouldn’t be done.
I agree it’s not something i typically pay too much attention to but since @Stagger_Lee created a post about this I thought it was appropriate that i ask the questions about this that i had. Because one can know things but not everything and there are many instances where I question my own understanding and knowledge because I’m not a human encyclopedia filled with all things Arch or Linux! I can use nano but vim i stay away from. 
Reading the Arch wiki is fine but sometimes it’s not totally understandable by those of us who are not hard core.