Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.

For your next hop consider EndeavourOS. It is Arch based and so has pacman and the AUR but it also has sane defaults and good configuration tools. Also, the default is quite pretty. Much less work to get a system going but all the flexibility of a pure Arch install.