blocking updating because you have or don’t have something else on your system seems to be basically the norm with Linux.

i mean yeah, when it does happen that's the correct failstate. The difference here is that it's trivial to troubleshoot and maintain. The chance that this happens is very low, unless somebody is rearranging packages in your repo. In which case that's an easy enough fix, and usually already scripted for. Something to do with AUR, which doesn't touch pacman. Or some hilariously convoluted piece of software kerfuckery.

Usually, it's handled remarkably gracefully.