so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
This. (although I follow the directions here, which is a little more than apt install). The only thing I couldn't get on Debian stable is the latest gnome. But when I tried debian testing, it was slightly broken anyway. And gnome extensions could get most of the functionality missing in my older gnome version. Debian stable + flatpak + anaconda + adding repositories (like for firefox) is a perfect compromise.
What's nice about a stable distro is you can update the things you want to update, and your OS isn't constantly changing a million packages a week that you don't even know the function of.