Assuming you enter your password upon running sudo, isn’t there the risk of sudo’s privilege timing out if pacman takes too long to complete? I believe I tried something similar, intending to run a one-liner I could start then walk away from. However, I ended up returning to see the system not rebooted hours later.
Or is yes somehow supposed to take care of this? Sorry, newish Debian user here who hasn’t ventured outside the distribution much.
Same happened with me and a USB video capture card I bought specifically for Debian Linux compatibility. One kernel upgrade later… doesn’t work. Try again on old kernel? Works. I’ll probably try in a few months, but I can’t be bothered now.