Its not a miracle it is just probability. When you have enough eyes on something you are bound to catch bugs and problems.

Debian holds back because its primary goal is to be stable, reliable and consistent. It has been around longer that pretty much everything else and it can run for decades without issue. I read a article about a university that still had the original Debian install from the 90's. It was on newer hardware but they just copied over the files.

I was running 12 stable on a machine that had been updated and upgraded in between the time when the backdoor was introduced and when it was discovered. At no point in time did either dpkg query or the self report show that system had the affected 5.6.0(?) version.

Stable had versions of xz that contained commits from the attacker and has been walked back to before those were made out of an abundance of caution.

There’s a lot of eyes on that software now and I haven’t seen anyone report that versions between the attacker gaining commit rights and the attacked version were compromised yet, as you said though: that doesn’t mean it isn’t and vulnerabilities have existed for many years without being discovered.

As to whether it’s a good argument, vulnerabilities have a short lifespan generally. Just hanging back and waiting a little while for something to crop up is usually enough to avoid them. If you don’t believe me, check the nist database.

I’m gonna sound like a goober here, but the easiest way to not trip is to slow down and look where you’re going.

I see it as a fantastic trade off. There are some packages I use that need to be more up to date than stable repos and I either install them from different repos or in a different way.

And arch never even had the whole backdoor because they built from source and didn’t include the poison pill binary component from the attacker.