Then you were definitely lucky with the timeframe. Arch specifically sometimes has updates you need a recent version of pacman to even apply, which means you’ll be left behind if you wait for too long. Last time was the switch to .zstd compressed packages: if you didn’t have a pacman that supported them you had to manually go and find a pacman from the correct time frame plus all it’s deps.
Then you were definitely lucky with the timeframe. Arch specifically sometimes has updates you need a recent version of pacman to even apply, which means you’ll be left behind if you wait for too long. Last time was the switch to .zstd compressed packages: if you didn’t have a pacman that supported them you had to manually go and find a pacman from the correct time frame plus all it’s deps.