People think “updates are time consuming” therefore prefer LTS because its supported for longer. I parole for quite some time that LTS has no place for private use and rolling release is the right way.
Sadly there is no way around it. The mentioned alternatives like regolith have already been mentioned. There is also some smaller distros with prepared twm configs, but I can’t recommend it. Because if you want to customize it, you will have a hard time finding the right ways to do it.
Using alacritty for years on all linux devices, it does what its supposed to do. Recent change to toml configuration was a bit of hassle. But with the latest release the migration is no problem anymore.
You didn’t mention a single argument for why you would need a reproducible system. It sounds more like the buzz around immutable systems makes you think you are losing out on something, which is not the truth.
Your experience with FreeBSD compared to OpenBSD is very similar to mine 5 years ago. Didn’t manage to get FreeBSD working but OpenBSD install was pretty easy. Although the performance still sucked compared to Linux.
There is no great/simple linux music player with proper cover display. Eliza was so wonky when I tried it months ago, the most simple functions didn’t work properly (like sorting for release year etc.)
I don’t understand what it means to "not get moved to backport repos, but this seems ubuntu specific. What you need is proper rollback/snapshot mechanisms in place. Looking at Tumbleweed which offers it out of the box. For Arch you can set it up yourself or use something community made like EndeavourOS.
Iam using Tumbleweed for close to 10 years now and it was pretty mature from the start. You can’t go wrong with rolling release + perfectly configured btrfs + snapper by default.