As an absent admin myself, I can assure you that the system can take a surprising amount of neglect and abuse. There were times when I feared the system was beyond repair, but I've been surprised time and again by how resilient it actually is. Nowadays, you can also use your least hated LLM to give you suggestions and help with interpreting logs.

The thing is, you can neglect your system for long periods of time, run system updates blindfolded, but eventually, the tasks pile up and catch up with you. My latest misadventure involved finding out the hard way that lots of packages that used to be in core, were moved to extra. You know, reading those announcements might be a good idea... Anyway, I was unable to update my system, because about half of the packages were no longer available in core. Eventually, I figured it out, enabled extra, fixed some of the stupid mistakes I made along the way, and the system was back to normal. Yay! After about two hours of messing around, I can finally get back to neglecting my admin duties again.