pacman is the best and I'll stubbornly refuse to entertain any other opinion. It's in my experience the least likely to just randomly rip the system to shreds. I don't know if it has more through prechecks or what bit I've had debian and Fedora (apt and dnf) rip the system asunder trying to jump multiple major versions in an update of a system that hadn't been online in a long time.

I don't care if jumping multiple releases at once "isn't supported" it shouldn't be that frail and arch will happily update something many years behind as long as you update the keyring.

Even in the event your system somehow does get hosed you can fix almost everything by just chrooting in, grabbing the static pacman binary, and running "pacman -Qqn | pacman -S -" I've recovered systems that had the entire /bin wiped (lol oops moment with a script) and as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all.