@phnt And by brittle I mean that a rather normal workflow shouldn't include having to do some kind of recovery.

Package fails to update or add a new package but system continues to work? 100% fine to me, could just report the issue and wait for a fix.
Package manager fails to update the signing keys? Urgh, this shouldn't happen.
Lack of library management so you can end up with pacman libraries being missing? Then why is there a package manager in the first place if not to manage dependencies and so avoid this kind of case.