Indeed. The installation on my laptop is now 4.5 years old and was on 3 different laptops and 2 different SSDs and yet there is absolutely no need to reinstall.

Indeed. The installation on my laptop is now 4.5 years old and was on 3 different laptops and 2 different SSDs and yet there is absolutely no need to reinstall. I maintain my system every now and then and never exceeded 1000 installed packages. If you have some time to spend on your system and the occasional hickups after/during updates then Arch is very easy to keep clean imo.