Thanks for the informative and detailed answer! I’ve only ever installed and used arch for fun so the finer points of how pacman handles manually installed packages never came up.

You said mostly safe, what kinds of issues can doing what you just described cause? You said pinning it through pacman would be an unsupported partial upgrade, even though that would give the package manager visibility on what you’re trying to do it would result in types of dependency resolution that aren’t supported or tested for I imagine?