I've been using arch for many years now. I've used various distros every once in a while, but I always come back to arch. When arch break it is probably a single package that is causing the issue, and there is likely a forum post explaining how to fix it already when you have an issue. However if I manage to break ubuntu for example, I always have a bad time getting the system back up without a reinstall. I haven't tried using BTRFS for snapshots yet, but I usually format my drive to BTRFS for new systems/reinstalls now, so I have the opportunity at least. Don't know if snapshots would have made a difference for the GRUB issue that happened though. Thankfully it didn't affect me as I use systemd-boot instead.

I also use Gnome, vscode and firefox. Don't know about matlab but there is a wiki page and an aur package, so I think it should work. For gnome if you use extensions, I recommend installing them from the aur, instead of from the web browser, as you won't need to manually update them. For vscode, there is an aur package for the official version from microsoft, but there is also a FOSS version on the main repo (though some extensions may not work/be available out of the box on that one).

One issue arch users may get after a while is the hard drive filling with cached packages. Pacman doesn't delete old packages from the cache automatically, so if you never clear the cache, you will get a copy of every version of every package you've ever installed in the cache. I've made it a habit now every once in a while I'll clear the cache, after an update and I've confirmed the system works after the update. There's a command "paccache" from the "pacman-contrib" package that's convenient for clearing cached packages.