I have been running CachyOS for 3 months now.

I have never, not once, looked at those announcement links.

And I just click on the fancy icon in my taskbar that runs pacman -Syu for me.

I'll have to look at .pacnew, but again, I think you're making this way bigger of an issue than it really is, these are pretty simple things to do and learn compared to other Linux bullshit I've had to deal with in the past.

Also, talking about updates, I remember an update in October? for two of my Windows PCs at the time that bricked Windows Update. The solution? Reinstall windows. So I installed Cachy instead.

*Edit, and I just looked at sddm/plasma, the latest plasma updates auto disabled sddm for me and enabled plasmalogin. So, not sure why it was a suggested manual change?