Saying the chance of something going sideways is smaller than on Windows isn’t saying much

True. I'll grant you that.

I’ll pick a distro that’s stable by default

Arch isn't "unstable" by any means. I've been running ~~Arch~~ EndeavourOS as my desktop distro that I develop on for years and it's entirely reliable. Now I personally wouldn't run Arch on any of my distros (I go with either Debian or NixOS), but there are people who do it and it works fine.

Edit: I said "Arch" but I meant EndeavourOS, which is Arch with some QoL improvements.