In my case Debian’s old package versions can often be awkward because I’m not using Linux exclusively… my macOS and Windows boxes are running latest releases of most things which can cause problems with e.g. sync features.
I usually run Fedora rather than Arch though, because in my limited experience with Arch it really doesn’t like to not be booted into for extended periods of time — if you do that the piled up updates are much more likely to break somehow or things like required config changes will slip through the cracks, whereas I have yet to experience this with Fedora.
For my use case, the details of the userland CLI is mostly irrelevant (particularly since I maintain a FreeBSD server, which means I’m reasonably familiar with both BSD and GNU styles of these tools). Most of the time it just needs to exist, not be any particular version, and exceptions are handled well by Homebrew. Third party apps with UIs being up to date is more important.
the AUR is user supported, no claims are made, but AURs are built off of short scripts called PKGBUILDs so it's easy to audit, you're gonna want to look for the line that links to a tar archive or git repository.
