On Archlinux it is not recommended to update only one package with the package manager pacman. Let’s say I have 11 packages, and one of them is extra/firefox (true story). Updating only a pacman -S firefox could introduce problems, but installing a new single package if it wasn’t there is okay.
So my question is, could we get around this by removing and installing the same package again in one go: pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox
It seems like there might be exceptions to the “no partial upgrades” which has not been discussed: you can pin your version of the kernel primarily to give time for packages like zfs to catch up to the latest kernel