The package archnews2 also provides an arch news reader. This issue was also announced in Arch forums before it was rolled out - I saw it in Lemmy.

But, yeah, you really do have to read archnews release notes. Frankly, it annoys me a bit - pacman should have the concept of breaking changes and show related news before upgrades. I think one of the news packages (maybe archnews2?) has a config setting that always displays news before upgrades, but it’s only annoying because it is ignorant of whether the news item affects any given system, so it’s often just noise; I think I turned it off because it kept showing me the same news every time.

It’s the worst part of Arch, and it’s poorly handled. I don’t know of a rolling release that handles informing the user of, breaking changes better, though.